Not a New Year "Resolution"

Make promises you can keep.

“Resoluting” is endemic to politics.  Declarations, proclamations, resolutions.  Our good intentions posted on wooden church doors and municipal bulletin boards.  Quarrelsome or jubilant. 

I’m not sure I want to go that far.  I’m coming up today a little less than “resolved.”  It seems a bit too rigid. 

But a New Year is not something we should waste.  Can we temper our ardor, which is so often spite and chest beating?  I suggest we decide to move off our “centers.”  Just a bit.  Tentatively.  Humility, in the face of uncertainty, as a virtue.

There was a Nova series exploration of ancient Chinese wooden architecture.  It exposed a model building (like those in the Forbidden City) to the equivalent of the worse torque inducing earthquakes ever experienced.  And it survived.  The great wooden pillars were not anchored to their base.  They rested on the foundation, but they moved independently.