|
Opinion
has always varied as to the worth of celebrating the New Year and its
almost obligatory accompanying resolutions. The irascible humourist
Mark Twain was notably curmudgeonly on the topic: ́New
Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to
anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls
and humbug resolutionsî. Perhaps he just never went to the right
parties or shared good times with family and friends.
As
my predecessor Gavin McGuren noted in his last editorial, the global
financial collapse may have stirred a sense of community left
languishing in the drive for ever-frenzied consumption. Maybe itís
time we turned more often not only to our families, friends and
neighbours but to ourselves. As novelist Ellen Goodman wrote, ́We
spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a
list of work to be done, cracks to be patched. Maybe this year, to
balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives, not
looking for flaws, but for potentialî. Could the real power of
resolutions be not just what we can do, but what we can be?Grant
Cotterell
|
