Finding Resolution

The days can blur together as they slide towards the end of the calendar year.  For many years, my work often kept me busy over the Christmas/New Year period, but nowadays I enjoy a work-free fortnight, or so, and thus there is less need for me to watch the calendar and the diary.  Somewhere between Christmas Eve and New Years Day I am pretty well guaranteed to forget what day it is, and feel like I am inhabiting a perpetual weekend.

Somehow, it feels wrong to be celebrating New Year at the height of summer.  There is growth abundant in gardens and among the wild life, and it has been this way for several months.  The climax of my gardening year is still three or four months away, for that is when the apples will ripen, and the pumpkin vines wither and expose their gifts to me for the winter ahead.  Now is the season to work early and late, when the shadows are long and the air is cooler, and spend the warm day reading or listening to the cricket or dipping in the pool or the lake - it does not feel like the end of a year, or the beginning of another.

But still we will watch the New Year fireworks fly and fall in dazzling cascades of colour above the great arch of The Harbour Bridge, lighting up the graceful curves of The Opera House, and filling The Cumberland Plain with swirling clouds of gunsmoke.

We will kiss loved ones, toast the incoming year, and grope for a response every time someone asks  us "What are your New Year's Resolutions?"  But, my year began months ago, close to the (Southern Hemisphere) Spring Equinox, when waves of pink or white blossoms lit up the bare branches of the fruit trees around my gardens, and the gardens of my neighbours - a sight more beautiful and better scented than those fireworks.

Or did it?  For a gardener, the making of resolutions is more likely to be an Autumn task, in response to recognition of the mistakes made and jobs not done as the seasons of warmth and growth are swept away with the falling leaves by the first gales from the south.  By Mid-Winter, Blue Mountains time, I will be trying to carry out the resolutions made in Autumn, in the hope of a better and more productive growing season to come.

The cold weather and long nights offer plenty of time inside at my desk to reflect, plan, and write.  It is perfect for the making of resolutions and the formulating of plans, blue-prints, and lists intended to carry those resolutions to fruition.

Perhaps we in Australia need to shift our New Year to July so that the official calendar aligns with our instincts and the pattern of our seasons.  After all, Yule-Tide in July has been a regular thing here in the Moutains for many years.

What did the First Peoples do, I wonder?  Did they have or mark in some way a 'beginning' to the year?  If so, when did they do it?  Or did they roll with the cycle of the seasons?  From all that I have read and heard, they seem to have had a complex set of indicators - the flowering of various plants, the arrival or departure of different birds and animals, as well as all sorts of astronomical signs - by which to understand the seasonal changes, and plan their next move.

It would be a more flexible and adaptive way of noting the passage of time than the rigid calendar the modern world is driven by - that calendar which does not quite fit with the actual movement of our world around its star, and needs regular trimming and fine tuning to keep it more or less in synch with natural reality.

The New Year's Resolutions made under that calendar often do not seem to fit, either.  For many, the Ritual of Resolutions seems to lead inevitably to a Day of Disappointment, as the last wishful promise fails or is discarded as too hard.  It's a bit like all those resolutions made as Political Promises every few years by our politicians as they face re-election.  They often sound terribly familiar (usually because they are), and that Day of Disappointment seems to be arriving so much sooner now than it used to.

Indeed, here and in many parts of the world, such disappointment is becoming almost perpetual - not a good omen for civil society.  Yet resolutions can be an expression of hope and intent and, perhaps like my winter-born gardening resolutions, failure might be averted by the application of planning and determination, and regular reminders of those good intentions.

For without hope, what is there?  When the nights are long, and the days are dim, hopeful resolutions offer a path back to blossoming springtimes and bountiful summers and autumns. When ever you make your resolutions, I hope they take you and your world down a good road, to a better future.