Resolutions
2 January 2008
Making resolutions this time of year seems to serve two purposes - it heightens our awareness of our weaknesses without in any way acknowledging our strengths. Perhaps that is why so many of them fail to survive into spring. Rather than resolving to change, maybe it would serve me better to create more possibilities for change to occur.
This word resolution comes from resolve, which comes from resolute. That seems straightforward enough, but with enough digging a few new nuggets emerged.
This word, resolute, has an old - now obsolete - meaning: determinate. In the Middle Ages it also had the meaning dissolution. The word's meaning then seemed to morph over time into "decision" and "determination". Chaucer used the word resolve, so it is quite old. And an odd thing is that one meaning way back then was "soften" and "slacken". And a final odd notation: another obsolete meaning (from the 16th Century) is "assure".
Sitting with these words now, along with all the genealogy, it is a bit clearer why resolutions are so problematic. Embedded in them is a kind of brittleness and rigidity. They hold the self-detonating devices necessary that make sure that they are unsustainable, and destined to join all the others in the trash heap of forgotten resolutions.
Resolute has the quality of "soldiering on" - sometimes in spite of what is ahead. The word has a kind of artificial masculinity to it. A word on steroids. Once the initial rush passes, that moment when a resolution is "made", the artifice wears off. The first strong wind that comes, the first moment of weakness, and the resolution dissolves into a vague memory.
Rather than resolute, I prefer in this moment to sit with the word "steadfast". Stead is a place, a position. It is an old word, and Old Norse and Old Germanic word. Yet it is also related to the Latin word statio, station, and statim, meaning immediately - as in Now.
The fast part of steadfast has another old meaning beyond the common one we use nowadays. It means "firm". It also means "deep", and "sound", as in fast asleep.
There is something remarkably powerful about the phrase "holding fast", rather than being resolute. The sense of holding to a position - like a direction on a compass - or taking a stand, a stand that also speak of a deep rootedness in the ground, or a deep sounding in the sea.
Steadfast seems to speak, or point to, this depth much more than resolute does.
Again this journey takes me back to a place I have visited before - to affirmations and declarations, instead of resolutions. The root of affirmation is firmus, meaning simply "firm", as in to assent strongly. And declaration's root is clare, "to make clear". There is also another, obsolete meaning for declare that is valuable to recall here - manifest. The root for manifest is manus, "hand". This speaks to me of crafting what is so. It is then in the very crafting, in the action of declaring something to be so that we literally make it clear. This act of declaring allows us to reveal some deeper truth about ourselves to the world.
Perhaps then it is all about some lovely interplay between holding steadfast to this deeper truth, and making this truth clear and explicit, that creates the possibility for change.
The place where I have now landed, this way station that allows me to rest for a moment, speaks to me of New Year's Declarations, rather than Resolutions. And such a declaration, to stay true to the languages of the ancestors, is crafted over time. Such a declaration reveals itself slowly each day a little more, like the form secreted in stone that the stonecutter reveals with each tap of his hammer.
Such declarations then are invitations for me to continue to craft myself - one word at a time.