Last week, I took stock of my accomplishments this year. I took a look at the launch of my personal career in Freelance Writing and the projects I was lucky to work on. I looked to the short film I finished and the feature film that’s nearing completion. I held the book I had spent all summer writing and opened the files to the other features I’m still writing. And for a moment, I felt pride.
That was when the worry set in.
I looked to the months of stilted progress in my career in the fall. And the spring I spent wasting the precious hours I held after my day job. And suddenly those accomplishments felt more like tiny moments of success in a tide of failure. And I think so much of that has to do with our perception of time.
Humans love dates. We have a beautiful penchant of creating and organizing things we have little control over. We turned the forward march of time into cycles. The cycle of hours in the day, and months within years.
The problem with this cycle is that we begin to prescribe ourselves to the peaks at valleys without even realizing it. We take a year of accomplishments and can easily break them down into the months of failure. We gerrymander our usage of time to justify waste or minimize success. And what’s worse?
We can so easily fall into the illusion that waiting until the beginning of the cycle grants us immunity from all of that guilt.
There’s little to be said about the concept of New Year’s that hasn’t already been said. But I think there’s too much of an authority placed on the idea of the clean slate of a new year. Gym memberships skyrocket in January, only to plunge months later.
The idea of pacifying your own internal dissatisfaction with a new month or a new year only exacerbates the problem.
It’s too easy to give up on a goal or a dream started in a new cycle. By nature of our perception of our time, we can always wait until the start of a new cycle. And it’s this roundabout way of procrastination that prevents us from accomplishing what we really want to. I liken it to the concept of the ouroboros — the ancient Egyptian symbol of the cycle of creation and destruction. It’s this cycle of resolutions and re-resolutions that ultimately results in self-destruction.
So this year, I started 2018 on December 1st. I went ahead and made my new year’s resolutions and began to work towards them immediately. I don’t want to have to wait for a calendar or a season to tell me when and how to improve my life. And I certainly don’t want the social acceptance of others if or when I fail at my new years resolutions.
Because the point of a new start isn’t to rectify yourself with the manmade cycle of time. It’s not to wait until everyone else repeats tired notions over drinks and music to make your start.
It’s to start over, and to start now.
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