As I face this next section, I hesitate about what I feel will be worth writing. Right now, in talking with Silvia, I look at the way we divide time. These divisions into years do many positive things as a record, as a historic structure, but it does more than that. It gives us a specific time where we all can look and tell ourselves and each other that tomorrow doesn't have to be yesterday. We don't celebrate a re-dating for historic purposes or contractual purpose, or tax purposes. We say Happy New Year with the emphasis on the new. It's a new year, and in that newness, we hope and believe that we can make things new. That's what it says. We can do so, and that's what all this writing is about, the newness we can make and become every day.
However, we can choose to make this newness into an attempt at domination of our ego over our self through what we call resolutions. Such resolutions tend to work like weight losing diets. We force an arbitrary goal on ourselves, declare that we have to do this resolution or suffer some unspoken consequence. We even do it for a while, but generally it falls away. These resolutions feel like deprivation and coercion, and our self resists the force, even our identity and ego resists that force because we don't realize how deeply committed we can feel to a way of acting and seeming to ourselves and the world. In the end, because we feel them arbitrary, they fall quietly away. Some weight is dropped and then regained. A few cigarettes go un-smoked, but the light up irresistibly beckons again at some point and so on. The main effect of the resolution into loss of resolution comes in our trusting ourselves just a little less. We tell ourselves we will accomplish some goal or another, and our ego answers: "Sure, just like that last time." Resolutions come to us and sound and feel like demands. If we want to find the new, create the new, we might do better through the idea of choice rather than the demand for change. That's also what this writing is about.
We are the story we tell ourselves, and we can retell our stories in such a way that we become inevitably the hero of our tale. At the very moment we make the choice of retelling our story to make something new from the story of our lives, we have become the hero. We have taken our past and make of it a tool to make a better present and future by creating balance and movement through choices. These choices bring us back to our search for the becoming self, for an identity that opens us to the joys of the moment and the possibilities for the future. These choices may need to come incrementally as have mine, but when they come, we know our heroic selves. Whatever choices we have made in our past, no matter how much those choices did us and even others harm, they have become part of the hero's journey not a record of our failure as human beings.
Charles Dickens opens David Copperfield with this: "Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show." Interestingly, the very act of writing or penning in the voice of the times, in these words, David, or Charles himself, becomes that hero. When we look back and take stock of what we have lived, we can tell our stories to make us a hero. That heroism comes in the very act of finding or making meaning out of the past, by finding or making meaning in the present, and out of the present which carries us into the future. We can make our sufferings and supposed failures as well as our joys and successes all part of the hero's journey and the hero's tale. I am no different than David and Charles as I enter this next section.