Start the New Year with Advice from Writer Paul Bowles
January 12, 2016
Though I love the promise of a new year—a fresh perspective, a clean slate—I’ve never been a resolution-maker. If anything, I openly defy the tradition of forced self-improvement. As such, my New Year’s resolution has been the same for the past five years: to eat more pizza.
That said, I like the idea of using the new year as an opportunity to combat complacency, to wake myself up. This year, in lieu of partying in some global capital, my friends and I headed to the bleak, windswept coast of Nova Scotia for a low-key New Year’s Eve. At the tail end of 2015, we wrote reflections on scraps of paper and then dramatically threw them into a bonfire, leaving them behind forever.
Swigging whisky, we then read passages on themes that ranged from love and courage to death and decay. (What? Isn’t that what you and your friends did at the stroke of midnight?) We ended the night with the following passage from Paul Bowles’s novel The Sheltering Sky. It’s a bit morbid, I’ll admit. But it’s also a critical reminder to be present, to be grateful, to be mindful of the passage of time.
“Death is always on the way, but the fact that you don’t know when it will arrive seems to take away from the finiteness of life. It’s that terrible precision that we hate so much. But because we don’t know, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens a certain number of times, and a very small number, really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
—Paul Bowles, The Sheltering Sky
Nice, right? I’m still sticking with my pizza resolution, but I enter this year with a new mindset towards work, friendship, creative pursuits, and general self-delight: Nothing is limitless, and every day matters. Here’s to being present in 2016.
