A new year, a clean slate

Really? I don’t think so.

Let me explain.

Change doesn’t happen just because someone hung a new calendar on your kitchen wall. What I’m trying to say and saying badly is this: If your life was going down the tubes on December 31st, 2010, it will probably still be going down the tubes on January 1st, 2011.

You are the same person you were yesterday, and so am I (the same person I was yesterday, not the same person you were yesterday), except that each of us is another day older (but not, it is hoped, as Tennessee Ernie Ford used to sing, deeper in debt). The Roman god Janus, after whom January is named, is most often depicted as having two heads, facing opposite directions, one head looking back at the last year and the other looking forward to the new, seeing into the future and the past simultaneously. So what?

Older is not necessarily wiser. There’s no fool like an old fool, as the saying goes, the implication being that one ought to learn from experience, and if one doesn’t, one is all the more pathetic in the eyes of one’s community. Stupid is as stupid does, said that great philosopher, Forrest Gump. Wisdom doesn’t come with age. Wisdom comes from knowing when to throw in the towel and give up entirely.

Wait...what?

It does no good to try to turn over a new leaf. Lifting oneself by one’s own bootstraps is usually an exercise in futility. It never works, or if it seems to work, the effect is only temporary. What we really need is a new life. And we can have one at any time.

Let me quote from St. Paul here: If we are out of our mind, it is for the sake of God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you. For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again. So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come! (Second Corinthians 5:13-17)

You don’t get a clean slate by trying to change yourself from the outside in. You get one by letting Someone Else change you from the inside out.

Not just once. Every single day.