The middle of July and I am thinking about resolutions. The kind that people make at the New Year. I wonder how many people made resolutions for 2020 and actually kept them. I mean, if you resolved to quit eating “Double Brownie Chocolate Fudge Caramel Ice Cream” and you heard the Corona Virus was coming your way? I bet the spoons would be in the cartons all over America.
I read a quote lately. A good one. Henry Moore said it. He is an English Sculptor who made mostly abstract suggestive forms of the female body. Anyway, while he was doing all that chiseling, this is what he said.
“I think in terms of the day’s resolutions, not the years.”
That is a good way to think if you ask me.
I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions. I make a lot of New Year’s prayers, or requests, I suppose you’d call them. But not resolutions, as I have found it is a good thing in life never to say never. Or never to say always. Either way, sooner or later, you’ll be proven wrong.
But I am the minority, I would suppose. Resolutions have been going on for a long, long time.
We would have to go back around 4000 years ago in ancient Babylon. That is when the earliest record exists for a celebration honoring the coming of a new year. Calendars were much different back then. So it happens that the Babylonians started their party in late March. That is the first new moon after the Spring Equinox.
They held a bunch of ceremonial events, which were known as the Akitu festival. I’m not sure if they called it Akitu, or if that is something we named it much later. Either way, it lasted 11 days. The festivities were dedicated to the rebirth of the sun god Marduk. Good old Marduk, the Sun God.
During those days, the Babylonians made promises in order to get on the right side of all of their gods. They felt this would help them start the new year off on the right foot. Hence. The New Year’s Resolution begins.
Others have kept this tradition throughout the years.
Take the Romans. They made resolutions. You see, they noticed that the early Roman calendar was no longer syncing up with the sun. So their leader, that guy with the leaves on his head, Julius Caesar, decided to make a change.
He brought in the best astronomers and mathematicians of the time. They drew, designed, and figured. Finally, they introduced the Julian calendar, which more closely represents the modern calendar we use today. Caesar declared January 1 the first day of the year to honor the god of new beginnings, Janus. Forget Marduk. Think Janus. They offered sacrifices to Janus in honor of the New Year. A way of hoping for good things, making promises to Janus. And so it goes.
Fast forward to now and our resolutions.
I guess, looking at myself good and hard, that I’m not too much of a resolver. There have been too many times when I’ve made up my mind about something, only to have it changed. I only make a resolution when it has some pretty high stakes, those life-altering resolutions.
Maybe by the time 2021 rolls around, I’ll feel differently about making resolutions too. As I said, I try never to say never. Or always.
I always do.
============
“Just when you think you know…..you don’t know.”
― Nanette Mathews
=============
“Do I contradict myself? Very well, then, I contradict myself; I am large — I contain multitudes.”
― Walt Whitman
==========
“Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.”
― George Bernard Shaw
===========
