REAL CHANGES

After all, there is nothing real about the end of a year or the beginning. Nobody’s life is actually divided into years. The stations at which you really change trains do not recur at regular intervals. The divisions which are important occur, for example, when you cease to be a baby or when you cease to have a digestion, when you begin to get your own way, or when you settle down to do without it. And obviously the number of such divisions varies very much with different people. Some of us change trains many more times than other people. Simple folk complete life in just a few through carriages. The more elaborately organised – or shall we say the more restless? – may make a hundred changes. Their lives are full of now starts, full of good resolutions – or bad – at any rate, of fresh resolutions. And this raises the fundamental difficulty of New Year reformations. You discover, let us say, that you want to be more energetic or to improve your complexion, and you make a good resolution to go to bed early and get up early. Probably you do not keep it, and all is well. Possibly you do, and in a little while you discover, or other people discover, and make no secret about it, that you are developing a temper worse than ever you had before. Few of us can afford that luxury. The good resolution is dismissed to its appointed place in the pavement of another world. Though, indeed, if hell is really paved with good intentions, they must be much more durable or its traffic much more scanty than we are wont to suppose. But there is another difficulty. Who shall ensure you that what seems a good resolution in the dying hours of 1919 will still seem good in the end of 1920? You must be singularly stolid, singularly unresponsive to the changes of a changing world, if one year after another finds you holding precisely the same opinion of what you are and what you would like to be, of what you ought to have and what you are likely to get. The woman who wanted to be brilliant the other day is mighty grateful now if people will think her kind. The woman who was going to be a philanthropist two years ago is now sure that it is all she can do to keep her family to a good temper. And again, of course, vice versa. The good resolution of this year will seem a lamentable error when another year or two have gone.