Making New Year resolutions is just fine. Keeping and implementing them is an entirely different matter!

By Stanley Collymore

There are those who with the fast approaching climax of the year 2017 will cheerfully or else unconcernedly say we should celebrate its end and whatever good things, if any of substance, that it did individually bring to those who were fortunate enough to receive them, but then in accordance with all this immediately and happily move on with our lives to welcoming in the rapidly advancing New Year of 2018.

All that, I suspect, with the unthinking prospect of readily discarding the old on the one hand and on the other fulsomely embracing the new one. The foundation to that being that the past is precisely that and consequently there’s absolutely nothing that can be done about changing an empirical fact. So why then waste time, energy and even the possibility of expending valuable money looking back at, much less so attempting in revisionist fashion to reinterpret or, worse still, entirely alter what the past really represents? In other words, what are firmly established and completely unalterable facts!

One way, I guess, of looking at it if superficiality is all that the casual or unthinking observer has in mind. But while for certain it’s categorically clear and unquestionably true that the past itself cannot or, furthermore, should not be unhinged from what has actually previously gone on it’s even so from any accurate and prescient-minded perspective and, at best, rather naïve in the process too to basically dismiss the past as a distant irrelevance with no meaningful or pertinent influence on the present, and far less so on the impending future.

For to smugly think that while inanely believing that actually there isn’t anything substantive to be gained from examining the past and learning from errors that were made there, whether these were consciously, unintentionally or even imprudently made is not only idiotic at best, but also at its very worst positively insane.

And while characteristics of 2017 might in essence and on a personal level be altogether very comforting, and predominantly so from a psychological assessment; however, in fancifully or even earnestly overlooking, ignoring or calculatingly discarding the unadulterated truth about 2017 is forthrightly purely wishful thinking and in that context alone doesn’t bode well in any circumstance thereof - for lessons not learnt and all that sort of thing – for the inauguration of 2018.

It’s quite easy to understand why and likewise how one can be sympathetic towards persons who, specifically through no fault of their own, have been subjected to immense and intense traumatic experiences that they in turn wish to and have concertedly done everything in their power to erase from their consciousness as best they can, because they’re too psychologically caught up in the painful experiences of it all and accordingly don’t wish to dwell upon them.

And while I’m not suggesting for a single moment that such an enterprise shouldn’t be taken by such individuals there is nevertheless a vast world of difference between endeavouring to intentionally blot out something quite unpleasant that happened to one’s self on the one hand, while on the other obdurately pretending, for whatever reason, that it never happened. All the more so since the real process of healing is to courageously, however difficult that might be, effectively deal with and hopefully finally come to terms with that particular unpleasantness in one’s life however agonizingly painful a task that might be.

Since without objectively doing so a proper and definitive closure, however delusion one may consider that they’ve attained that objective, will in all truthfulness never be entirely attained and in the attendant circumstances only serve as a festering sore which at any time could very well spontaneously break out again.

It’s the same state of affairs in everyday life and at whatever level that one can seriously and realistically think of, from essentially every day and seemingly mundane instances to crucial and potentially earth-shattering situations. For whichever way that it’s independently looked at the past does even so have a significant bearing on both the present and the future whether that is sagaciously and practically accepted or not. And whether or not that impact is for the common good of humanity universally or conversely for its utter destruction will, of course, depend considerably on the wisdom, or lack of it, of all those involved.

But, in my opinion, randomly making New Year’s resolutions which essentially any idiot can do without those involved being obliged to take full cognizance of what has earlier gone on in the previous year isn’t just purblind ignorance but also definitively the height of insanity.