In the liminal

a resolution revolution.

It seems appropriate that my first article on Substack is posted at the youthful, some may say optimistic, end of the year. This, I feel I must clarify, is down to opportunity not intention and, God forbid, certainly not a result of a dread resolution.

Eek. New Year’s resolution. Resolution. Listen to that. So very sure of itself, isn't it? Solid, all shoulders, chest and planted feet. Confident, brooking no argument, assuring success if we just stiffen our lip, present the best foot, apply a little back bone and, perhaps, stick out our neck; if we just press-gang our whole metaphorical body into a hokey-cokey against the mind’s natural inclinations.

I know, I say this every year. New Year’s resolution, that triumph of illusion giving temporary form and certainty to—at any other time of the year—our wishy-washy nature.

Janus, the Roman god with two faces—one looking back, the other forward—is often invoked at this, the dark of the year named in his honour. Janus represents endings and new beginnings, seemingly aligned with our desire to march into the new year as a reinvention. Possibly slimmer, fitter, more organised—we’re vague on the precise nature of the remodel but we’re all in agreement it should be better. We should be better.

I wonder, though. How well would a jump from “bad” to “good” serve us? I say jump because even though we cognitively understand that any change takes time, none of us are capable of assimilating this. It’s why we fail so well. Most of us have imagined a new self for so long that it's become an almost-reality, a golem birthed from wishful thinking ready to spring forth. Oh, for that Fairy Godmother! A quick swish, a cascade of falling stars, and we become! From this to that, from then to a future now. In our mind’s eye, the Sisyphean effort of self-improvement won’t take any longer or be any harder than our ability to imagine it.

Hey, dry those eyes! It's not our fault, this overconfidence in our ability to say no. Humans have survived as a species by evolving to gratify immediate needs while giving minimal consideration to any shitty outcome that might arise from them further down the line. Our planet’s ongoing destruction is a grim illustration of our future-blind wiring. As are elasticated waistbands.

Throw into the mix our inability to feel our future selves and you come to realise, with nothing more than a shrug and a small sigh, how the royal screwing of our NYE butterfly ambitions is inevitable. It’s almost comforting.

See, when scientists get bored they like to stick people in brain scanners, and there have been several occasions on a number of slow Tuesday afternoons where researchers discovered that people consider their future self as a stranger. (It’s all down to the medial prefrontal cortex apparently.) And because Present Us considers Future Us a stranger, we can’t connect to ourself on an emotional level. We can imagine what we might be like in a year, two years’ time, but we’re unable to form any meaningful emotional connection to that idea. We just can’t feel it, man.

Without this emotional component present to drive action, lasting change is impossible because we simply don’t care enough. Think about it. Do you care if a stranger hits their fitness goals in six months, a year, five years? Of course not. And the further into the future we cast ourselves, the more we care less.

Here’s another thing. We formulate our resolutions under the assumption that being slim/fit/organised/successful (delete as applicable) is somehow better. But if we’ve never been any of those things, how can we be sure? How can we be sure that our surrender, sacrifice and dedication—because that’s what it inevitably takes—will be worth it? How can we be sure that our investment is, firstly, placed in the right stock and, secondly, will be returned? All that hard work and deprivation could be for the benefit of a stranger who may not even appreciate the gift. As risk-averse opportunists, humans prefer to remain crouched over the here-and-now cheese board warding off advances with sharpened breadsticks.

New Year’s resolutions are strange things then, at face value seeming to support our attempts at improvement, but in reality in on the joke.

Of course we all know this. Despite the enthusiastic ra-ra-ing of the fitness and coaching industries, our human blind spot for future feeling, our need for certainty, for instant gratification, sameness, the dislike of discomfort and going without—we are predisposed to keep things exactly how we like it. Or rather, exactly how we don’t like it. There is comfort in staying uncomfortable. Ask any therapist.

Gosh, sorry. I realise this may sound terribly depressing. You might even be muttering about free will and the grit inherent to the human spirit as you draw up a progressive jogging training schedule across six months culminating in a charity run up Ben Nevis, a good cause made worthier because the longest you’ve jogged non-stop before is to the fridge and back that time you thought you’d left the Christmas camembert out of its lead-lined box. Hold up there because it’s going to get a whole lot worse.

But first, a little light relief. “A frontier has two sides,” observed the rather marvellous Ursula K Le Guin. “It is an interface, a threshold, a liminal site, with all the danger and promise of liminality.” Janus, too, was considered a threshold, a gathering place for the in-between, doorway to possibility, a timeless place of transition. It’s of the greatest of shame that this is the part we gloss over in the head-on rush to become other than we are.

The frontier year ahead, yawning empty as the dawn sky, rolls out to the far horizon. Or so we think. We believe the view to be unobstructed, the uncharted land ahead pristine and clear. What we conveniently forget in our excitable hurry to exploit and colonise this virgin territory is that all the mental junk from last year—and the year before, and the year before that—has already blown ahead on the draught of that open door. Out of view for now, our sunken psychic shopping trolleys bide their time before making a play for the ankles and bringing down our still-damp and faltering aspirations. As indeed they did last year. And the year before that.

Culturally infused with forward motion, January is expected to be both springboard and pack horse for our hurried yearnings to leave ourself behind. We see it as a frontier to be mapped or the new beginning promised by Janus. Out with the old, rubbish us, in with the new and improved. But let’s return to that other realm of Janus, that position that so excited Le Guin. What about considering the year’s turn as a resting place, a threshold?

Neither here and no longer there but affording a view of both from which to catch our breath. What if we allow ourselves to balance here, on the exhilarating, dew-washed edge of all possibility? Rather than seizing the soft, shapeless cloth of a new year and stitching it into a uniform so unforgiving that it hurts to breathe, we wait. We allow these darker, inward days to flow around us, melding to our current shape until the fit holds us without restriction. We cosy into transition, rather than force transformation.

Which brings me very neatly to death.

Oh, stop. You were warned.

Last year, on January 1st, Chris and I had been enjoying a winter’s walk. Along the slow bank of the river, through the crunching woods and frost-limned lanes. Beautiful. We happy chattered about the year ahead, our plans and hopes, how it was going to be the best year ever.

Then without warning, Chris disappeared from my side and lay agonised on the ground having slipped on ice, his left knee enjoying the walk so much it decided to go the long way around. Even as he recuperated over the following weeks, my mother needed a hospital dash to receive emergency care for a mini-stroke. The chest infection that followed had her bed-bound and scared. Various back and forths between doctor and hospital. She lost her indomitable confidence along with a vulnerable amount of weight. An initial diagnosis of pneumonia metastasized into one of potential lung cancer. Meanwhile, I’d been contacted by family long estranged to say that my brother had died, some weeks later confirmed as suicide. My mother’s elderly dog—a border terrier and therefore a natural contrarian—took ill and had to be euthanised. True to form, he did not go gentle into that good night. I dug the grave.

From the wild optimism of that New Year’s Eve—all those resolutions, those goals!—

2024 smartly presented itself as one of my worst years ever, even as I processed a year or so of therapy and struggled with accepting a diagnosis of autism. From January all the way through to autumn. Grimness upon grimness. Grief upon big and little griefs.

Yet as we’re talking transformation and positive change, 2024 has also been one of the best. Hands down. I have changed. How could I not? True, not according to those best-laid plans bounced from bubbles as the New Year tolled. But still, I have experienced a time of incredible personal transformation for which I am deeply grateful.

Our resolutions tend to be heavily weighted in favour of the immediate, the positive and the personally gratifying, but nothing focuses the mind on what we truly need to be happy and peaceful humans quite like an off-plan shitstorm. And the important, the vital, thing about shitstorms is that we have no control. We’re unable to draw up a training timetable, write a list of pros and cons, or research the best way to arrive at the desired outcome. We just have to ride ‘em out. Dig deep, be patient. Trust.

We need to view adversity as a process, rather than something to be got over as fast as possible. It is an anti-resolution. A transition that ultimately transforms us in a lasting way that we could not predict.

In Buddhism, the bardo is considered a liminal state between death and rebirth which provides lessons for spiritual growth and a good reincarnation. Obviously it would be rather impractical to die every time we wanted to drop a bad habit, but our everyday life is full of transitions from one thing to another that are pregnant with possibility for beneficial change, even if not at first apparent.

Some, like the tragic circumstances of my brother’s death, are huge, the ripples rolling outwards and no doubt continuing to effect felt and unfelt change in me, my family and the world at large. Others, like passing from one room to the next, to an exhalation from an inhalation, are so tiny they might barely register. Some will change us for the better, some for worse if we let them.

As I say, transitions are happening all the time; unlike resolutions, they’re not chained to the imperatives of New Year’s Eve. No need to hurl yourself at the year as if it’s a north face to be conquered. Drop the wish to teleport your way into a new you. Slow transition is where it’s at, not short-term gratification doomed to failure for the very real and valid reasons above. Softness not force. Being open and allowing. Shifting from fitting in to taking up space.

This year, drop your resolution illusions and start the year instead with a refreshing dip in the liminal.