Welcome back to Musings, and happy 2010 to all.

This is, of course, that time of year when, charged with the sense of a fresh start, we declare our intentions to be better people in the form of resolutions. It is a new year, and we will shed those unwanted pounds, or finally quit smoking, or take some long neglected creative project down from the closet shelf where it collected dust all year, and so on. This is all well and good, this annual taking stock and rededication to excellence in whatever form speaks to us. Yet all too often, in these declarations, we forget that it is not through our will that excellence is wrought in our lives, but through a collaboration with the forces of chaos, forces that are not subject to our will but move through our lives nonetheless, shaping and determining outcomes.

One of the many ways that this autonomy of the gods makes itself known is through the fickleness of our will. We may resolve that we will start getting up at six in the morning to begin a new exercise regimen, and when we go to bed the night before, our will is fully on board with the project. Somehow, though, during the night while we lay sleeping, the temperature outside suddenly dropped. Perhaps we failed to adjust the heater, and at six o’clock, the room is so much colder than we had expected. The alarm goes off to call us to action, but now our will has changed. Our resolve now is to stay in bed another half hour, under the warm covers. We can always start exercising tomorrow, and so on. This is just one example of how what we call our will actually comprises many wills, often conflicting and subject to the whims of changing conditions. What we write on the tablet of our life with resolve one moment we cross out just as resolutely in the next.

I am not saying that our will is always fickle in this way, only that it is always subject to the greater will of the gods, such that in those cases where our resolve succeeds, it is, in a way that is rarely acknowledged, because the gods saw fit to spare us conditions in the face of which our will would have been overtaken by a contrary resolve. We are by our nature subject to changes of heart. In other words, it is less that we see our resolve through to victory than that victory is granted by the gods. The power of our will lies not in itself, but in grace, in the cooperation of forces that move with a will of their own beyond anything we can see or anticipate let alone control.

Does this mean that we shouldn’t make new year’s resolutions, that doing so is hubris? No. Setting out in what we know are better directions can be an expression of diligence. On the path of humility, however, we will not forget that the success of our resolutions depends not on our will but on the gods, and in this remembering, our resolutions take on the nature of a request. They become softer, a little less strident, as we allow them to be informed by our willingness. To be willing to be better, knowing that we live each moment by the grace of something greater, something mysterious, something that does not consult us in the unfolding of outcomes—this has little to do with the making of resolutions as it usually is understood, and it is the difference between these two that explains why so many resolutions come to nothing. The man or woman walking the path of humility understands that, while our failures are our own, our victories come as gifts before which we can only bow in gratitude.

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This entry was posted on Monday, January 4th, 2010 at 4:43 am and is filed under News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.