Gently does it as we brave a new year

For a while there we were all about community ... for a while there, we cared

SO here we are, folks, with New Year’s Eve almost upon us. Chances are – even if you consider the turn of the calendar’s page from December 31 to January 1 to be an arbitrary, man-made milestone – you’ll still allow yourself a moment or two to think over the events of the outgoing year and consider how you’ll approach the incoming one.

Like most people, I have plenty of ghosts-of-New-Year’s-Eve-past. They clatter around in my psychological attic, rattling the bones of broken resolutions and stomping on the shards of shattered intentions.

In the past, I’ve prepared for New Year’s Eve by reading books on how to form good habits and how to bust bad ones, books on how to stop procrastinating and how to set up systems for managing the proliferating administrivia of modern life … and yet I’ve changed relatively little.

The problem, of course, is human nature. As James Clear points out in Atomic Habits, we Homo sapiens are still using the cognitive equipment we had installed back when food was scarce, life was short and we lived with the real possibility of being lunch for a sabre-toothed tiger.

Because we’re wired to prioritise our immediate needs and desires over our long-term wellbeing, we’re programmed to reach for yet another slice of leftover Christmas cake, watch one more episode before bed, buy those fabulous Fluevogs in the online sale and turn a blind eye to that new fossil fuel project. It’s hard for us eat moderately, get enough sleep to cope effectively with tomorrow, save our hard-earned cash for an emergency or leave the freaking coal in the ground. Life’s short, our brain tells us. And the slavering tiger is just around the corner.

Here at the hinge of 2022 and 2023, I find myself thinking not only about our all-too-human failure to act in the best interests of our future selves, but also about our tendency to forget the lessons of the past. Even the very recent past.

Few of us have had an easy time of it in the last few years. Covid days brought immense losses to some people; other people suffered smaller – but still painful – ones.

It’s another aspect of our hardwired human nature, I suppose, to hurry past pain, minimise it, behave as if it didn’t happen, or wasn’t such a big deal after all. In our fervent desire to ‘get back’ to what we call ‘normal’, many of us are behaving as if Covid is over, or at least nothing to worry about. We also seem to be unlearning the lessons of the pandemic.

For a while there, we were all about community. For a while there, as we struggled to homeschool our children, we understood teachers did a freakishly good job. For a while there, as we faced the prospect that someone we loved might be admitted to a hospital in a life-threatening condition, we understood the pressure on short-staffed medical professionals. For a while there, we recognised the toll the pandemic was taking on the population’s mental health. For a while there, we cared.

But what are we doing about class sizes in schools? About staffing in hospitals? About properly funding mental health treatment? Not nearly enough. Because we no longer feel as if we’re at the pointy end of the threat.

My mum was telling me, this week, that she heard someone on the radio talking about the concept of choosing a word for the new year, rather than making resolutions that we humans – with our prehistoric brains – are just as likely to break.

A word like ‘honesty’ or ‘integrity’, ‘inclusiveness’ or ‘magnanimity’, can still be an intention, but it’s more of a north star than a breakable rule.

And so, with this advice in mind, I’m choosing the word ‘gently’ as my guide to 2023. Given the events of recent years, it’s likely that we’ll all be dealing, regularly, with people who are hurt and damaged, or at the very least disappointed and tender. We’ll encounter people who’ve lost loved ones, jobs or businesses, people who had taken from them the final days with elderly relatives or the chance to share the earliest days of new babies’ lives with their extended families, people whose relationships fell apart and people who’ve been through – are still on – turbulent mental health journeys.

‘Gently’, to me, signals not my desire to put recent years behind me, but instead an intention to incorporate their lessons, to remember that there are still a lot of hurt people out there, to appreciate and continue to fight for the things

I’m choosing the word ‘gently’ as my guide to 2023

that turned out to be most important in the tough times. Tough times that will doubtless come again, of course, although in a different guise.

This week, my Facebook feed offered me up a meme that resonated with my feelings as we say goodbye to 2022 and prepare to face its successor. It read: ‘Nobody claim 2023 as “your year”. We’re all going to walk in real slow. Be good. Be quiet. Be cautious and respectful. Don’t touch anything.’

That’s me this year. No big expectations, no set-in-stone plans, not even any especially high hopes – just a few modest ones, lightly and cautiously held. Gently, gently.