There are entirely too many opportunities for renewals and starting
overs in my life. Having lived and worked in the academic world for so
long, I naturally think of June as the end of a year, September the
beginning, and "summer" as some free-floating undefined time all its
own. By late December, however, I usually find that my autumn-fresh
plans have gotten derailed, my resolve is ragged, and there's not much
chance any of my purposes will be achieved unless I make a radical
change. So I come to New Year's Eve determined to begin again.
On the
Feast of
Stephen I alluded to the changes I wanted to make. I call them the
"Six Goals of a Quality Life." The name is a loving (
really!) tribute to the Twelve
Goals of a Quality Education, a set of standards once imposed upon
public schools by the Pennsylvania Department of Education. Each
academic unit in a school had to show how its curriculum met each goal,
and there were lengthy staff meetings where we had to wrestle with
language to show how, for example, studying Emerson and the
Transcendentalists contributed to the Quality Goal of personal safety
for each student.
The concept meshes well with an exercise from a book on weight loss and
body image by
Lesléa
Newman, a writer best known perhaps for her delightful but
frequently-challenged children's book,
Heather Has Two Mommies. In one of
the early exercises she suggests that you make a list of six or seven
things you would like to accomplish in the next year, not necessarily
weight-related.
I've done the exercise more times than I can count. Once (I
think it was last year), I opened my datebook to the week of New Year's
Eve and
endeavored to write down the ways I wanted to improve myself. I got the
ideas all down on the page, looked at them, and realized that they were
the exact same goals I had set the year before. Not only that, I had
failed to move even a smidgen in a positive direction on any of them.
So I've set my goals again. I want to lose weight, declutter my house,
write a novel, do some cross-stitch again, see old friends and make new
ones, and go to Wyoming. Well, Wyoming wasn't in the last set. At least
that much is new.
Benjamin Franklin in his
Autobiography
tells of how he set for himself a program of self-improvement. He drew
up a chart of thirteen virtues that he wished to cultivate in himself
and endeavored to keep track of ways in which his behavior supported or
worked against the development of each quality. He found himself
sometimes taking more steps backward than forward. He told the story of
a man who went to a tinker to have his ax sharpened. The tinker asked
the man to turn the wheel while he honed the blade until it sparkled.
It soon became clear that the craftsman's perfectionism would never be
satisfied, and the customer wearied of turning and turning the wheel.
But the tinker was reluctant to stop while the blade still had specks
and bumps. "Perhaps," said the owner, "I like a speckled ax best."
In 2005, I hope at least to reduce the speckles.
