Happy New
Year, Class of 2015!
As you
begin 2014 (that’s right — the year before you graduate!), you are faced with
all the resolutions, promises, and renewals that new years bring. This is one
of my favorite aspects of life, although it can be one of the hardest to get
used to: we begin again, again and again. Each new day, or hour, or breath, is
also an opportunity to restart our lives, but the years somehow make starting
over seem like a really powerful possibility.
It might
feel, at times, that you are on a course, and that each event, or effort, each
success or failure, leads to the next one, and that these all add up to the
future. In a way that’s true. Causes have effects. But that fact can lead us to
ignore the power of renewal in our lives. Sometimes causality works in
counterintuitive ways. Sometimes the most abject failure wakes us up to what we
really want to be doing or to who we really are. Alcoholics and addicts,
bottoming out, may recognize a brighter future in sobriety. Negligent parents,
faced with the suffering of their neglected children, often suddenly quit
overtaxing jobs. People from all walks of life, in a rut, can move on.
You don’t
have to wait for a midlife crisis or disaster to start over. Sometimes a new
year resolution involves a habit or two, but new years can also bring
revolutions. These can take place as radically or as prosaically as you need.
Do you always find yourself forcing a smile, pretending to want to do the things
your friends are doing? If you are starved for time alone with your thoughts,
take it. Reinvent yourself as monk-like, solitary. Do you put things off until
everything is in crisis mode? Procrastination isn’t an inevitable part of your
personality. You can completely change the way you work. Have you formed an
identity at Trinity completely around one activity, club, or major, and feel
your sense of wonder narrowing? Break free. You might be a painter, a
neurologist, a philosopher, a tennis player who has been lying dormant, waiting
for the opportunity for rebirth. You may find the love of your life or the most
important collaborator you’ve ever had by starting over.
2014
won’t be your last rebirth, and probably hasn’t been your first. But it is the
one that’s happening right now. The present moment, all you ever have, is
electric with possibility. May your New Year’s revolutions be liberating and
satisfying.
Kyle Gillette
Class
Marshal
