New Year's Resolutions

One of the great pleasures in life is to be able to take a week or two off at the end of a year to make some new year's resolutions. It's a privilege to be able to do this, to have the time and space. I see it as immensely practical, too.

Deciding what is worth doing, before thinking of how to do it, has always seemed to me to an underrated, under-appreciated, work. So it's always a delight to see a young person who is seriously asking this fundamental question, – What is worth doing? - taking his or her time to explore it rather than having to go to immediately into a job or career to make a living. I can well understand parents, who have all they can do to survive and to pay the bills, feeling frustration and anxiety about young people going through this work. “We will be glad when you get all this searching out of your system and settle down.” But it is surely better to think through what is worth doing when young, although it can take a lot of time.

William James wrote and excellent piece on it, What Makes Life Significant, following a earlier excellent piece written by Leo Tolstoy in his A Confession. Both James and Tolstoy wrote those in their fifties, after a whole lot of worldly experience, which may sometimes be necessary in order to work out an individually satisfying answer to the question.

There is the young Thoreau writing at the beginning of Walden; 

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." 

Thoreau often got criticized for not leading a more conventional life, but I think one of the great values of Walden was that he earnestly took on the question and legitimized it. He said in this connection, for example:

“For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it. ”

So I am in a position to report to you today that there are light snowflakes falling gently, drifting down in front of my windows here in Dayton as I write.

Another reason for taking some time to sort out some resolutions for the new year is to help to protect oneself from the distractions and deceptions that are constantly presented to us, like TV, the latest bubble or confidence game, and such. Life is so short, particularly when you are seventy-three, that you don't want to miss the truly good and to waste what little life remains on something stupid.

Rudolf Steiner wrote somewhere that if you make a resolution, it is best for your spiritual development that you do it, that you follow through on it. I'm sure there are situations in which he is correct, but I think there clearly are also situations when you uncover new realities in your experience that mean you should re-evaluate where you are going, change your mind, abolish the old resolution and set out a new one.