The old year, then, has sailed, and with it goes the long tail of misery by which it will always be remembered.
2010 has gone, and in the senselessness which characterises human life, why not use the fact that the earth has just completed another orbit of the sun to wish for an improvement in fortunes?
The arbitrary boundary where one year bleeds into the next is a signal for hope and for change which we feel as a species; which acts as a brake on history.
Even the lonely fall in line with the convention - perhaps we'd prefer to face the future when we've consumed x cups of tea, or ignored three dozen strangers, or petted seventy-nine cats in the street, and yet the rhythmic predictability of a yearly cycle is enough to lure us into conformity.
More than an overhaul of the self - the optimistic predictions of incremental lifestyle changes which seldom endure - the barrier which is the aggregation of sorrow must be removed before any progress at all can be made.
I laughed earlier when I heard the American idea of dumping the past 12 months into a public receptacle in Times Square - much like the contents of this blog, real-world problems which are repeatedly discussed without being solved then become psychological issues which even a gifted professional cannot hope to untangle.
What begins as a serious attempt to confront an impediment quickly descends into the articulation of the same problem over and over again without resolution, and this half-heartedness serves only to re-inforce the very thing we wish to remove.
So there must be seriousness and finality when we make the decision to break with our own history, else the consequence of only partial commitment is to entrench oneself ever-deeper in the pit which has been carved out by your own hands.
Nothing is forever - so reads page 1 of the pessimist's manuscript. All that I have, I am inevitably destined to lose as age and habituation take their toll on everything around me, before eventually collecting the sad-eyed observer to complete the job. We speculate that the earth, and even the universe, are finite, physical objects, living on borrowed time.
If nothing's forever, though, then the events which have damned your author need not cause permanent damage. They are transitory, to be removed with the same automatic motions with which I take off a jacket, and not given a second thought.
In the most cherished tenet of the pessimist's manual, thus do we find the inevitable seed of its own destruction, and we can express the wish that the remnants of the events which have caused instability can be turned towards steadying the self in the arbitrary moment when we declare: enough is enough.
