Let’s Retire ‘Happy New Year’
For the last few weeks of December, and deep into January, the secular greeting resounds everywhere in the land.
“Happy New Year.”
It’s spoken. Written in emails, texts, and WhatsApp fragments. Intoned by broadcasters, politicians, anyone who touches the public.
It’s so much a reflex that if we don’t extend the wish when we speak or meet or communicate, its absence makes the exchange cold and disconnected. We have willfully ignored the seasonal mandate.
But let’s unpack the phrase “Happy New Year” for not just its utter meaninglessness, but it’s lack of insight into what makes our lives rich and complex.
If truth be told, there’s really no reasonable possibility of having a “Happy New Year.” While there are some years that might retrospectively deserve the appellation — you might have won the lottery or had a first novel published (actually, they are the same thing) — and there some that are truly an annus horribilis — most years are a series of moments.
A year is a dense and jagged continuum; it is cubist, dosed with joy and burdened with challenges. It oscillates by the minute. What’s more, our brains aren’t wired to be able to look back on a full twelve months with appropriate perspective. Consider the cognitive bias called the“Availability Heuristic,” which Wikipedia defines as a “mental shortcut that relies on immediate examples that come to mind…{so} people heavily weigh their judgments toward more recent information.
So an ugly November might make you think that your year wasn’t a particularly happy one, even though January through October were simply sparkling.
Since a year is an assemblage of moments that are ours to do what we will with them, I propose a new wish at this time of the year:
“Have a year of happy moments.”
That’s all anyone can hope for. It’s what Martin Seligman and other experts on happiness tell us is essential to a life of meaning and uplift.
Savoring and mindfulness, grace in the moment, are what can bring us joy in the act of being. It’s what the writer Anne Lamott so artfully crystallizes in the title of her new book, “Small Victories: Spotting Improbable Moments of Grace.”
These improbable moments and epiphanies are what animated the Romantic poets, too. Finding near infinite joy in the tight temporal boundaries of the finite isn’t a new, self-helpy phenomenon. Wordsworth wasn’t positioning itself to show up on Oprah or Dr. Phil when he famously wrote in the “Prelude” that “There are in our existence spots of time”
These heightened moments, Wordsworth notes, are able to “nourish” and “invisibly repair” our lives. They make us “when high, more high, and lift us up when fallen.” And as a reminder that perhaps is more relevant today than ever, the “Prelude” proclaims that “Such moments/Are scattered everywhere…”
There can be no greater wish and possibility to bestow on others than the ability to find these nano opps in the interstices and crannies of our lives.
In fact, the intentional reframing of a year’s blessing to a “Year of happy moments” instantly changes the horizon of expectation. A whole year of joy is a heavy lift, but a necklace of moments is not only foreseeable, but within our own powers. As it should be. It is up to us as individual seekers to find Wordsworth, not to others.
Of course, “Happy New Year” is more American than “Happy new moments.” We are a nation of the big, sweeping statement and gesture.Manifest Destiny, after all, was a mission to possess a continent, not to take a few steps westward, pause, and smell the roses in New Jersey.
A bit of unexpected good news about our social media world is that it is capable — despite its much-derided tendencies of encouraging narcissism and self-enveloping — of teaching us the gratification that comes from savoring the moment. At its best, Facebook lets us enter the lives of others and feel their compressed, often clumsy, and even near-fatally clichéd expressions of gratitude or awareness or splendor.
Last year, Facebook took a lot of heat — and eventually apologized for — a sociological experiment where they populated 700,000 newsfeeds with happy content to see if it was contagious. It was. (So was negative information; call it the contact bummer.) Which means that when you wish someone a year of happy moments — and when we alert ourselves to be on the lookout for those moments — we might actually be spreading that ability to perceive in fragments.
Moving from “Happy New Year” to “Happy new moments” would be a shift from a mindless reflex to a wish of mindfulness and appreciation. And not a moment too soon.
