Keeping New Year’s resolutions and a reminder of humility
I take time the day before the start of each new year to reflect on the world and my life and arrive at a few personal resolutions. My intentions are good. My follow-up is not. As I read over last year’s goals, I failed to reach many.
It’s humbling to realize how often you don’t measure up to your own resolutions.
But this insight gave rise to one simple resolution for myself and the world in the new year: To practice humility and avoid as best I can loud and obnoxious people.
Isaac Newton, one of the world’s greatest scientists was a humble man: “I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
The opposite of humility is pride, the need to justify one’s self above all else.
The creation story in the Book of Genesis describes heightened self-importance as one cause of human suffering. Proverbs, a later book of wisdom makes it clear: “When pride comes, then comes shame; But with the humble is wisdom.”
As I reflect on my life, I understood now what great impact teachers have had on me, although at the time I did not realize it. I went into teaching and writing myself because a fourthgrade teacher encouraged me to write, and later two college teachers to think for myself, to be curious and humble.
I laugh now at what R.H. Blyth said about his teacher, D.T. Suzuki: “He taught me all that I don’t know.”
One of life’s great lessons is learning what is in your power to control and what is not. Many of us waste time and energy trying to control what is beyond our ability to do so. How much better and deeper would our lives be if we learned this simple lesson?
You can be humble. Each time you make a claim about what you know, ask yourself if you really do know it for certain. When you react too emotionally to those who challenge your claim, take a deep breath before you respond.
You can try to avoid obnoxious and prideful people but can’t always do so. If they can’t control themselves, you can’t do it for them. The best you can do is take another deep breath and walk away.
Pride is a difficult thing to control as well, as Ben Franklin knew: “There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive. Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.”
In this new year, I will practice humility, to be less judgmental of others who don’t agree with me, and more receptive to new insights. And I wish the same for our world, a small planet circling a thirdrate sun somewhere in the vast cosmos.
In other words, understanding with Newton that the great ocean of truth lays undiscovered before us.