I have had the same exact New Year’s Eve resolution for as long as I can remember: “Do better.”
It might seem easy and overly simplistic, but if you have spent any extended period of time attempting self-improvement, you know how difficult change can be to bring about. The marking of a new season can help measure change. I believe that is why we are celebrating a new year, or maybe it’s because we made it through another span of difficulty.
Resolutions rarely stick. I watch the gym at the beginning of each year, packed to the brim, and 90 days later we are back to open treadmills.
Angela Duckworth wrote in “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” that “enthusiasm is common. Endurance is rare.” I agree. We might start excited, but eventually our fortitude will be tested, and the fun time becomes a hard time. This is when the actual progress begins.
I used to read John Knowles’ “A Separate Peace” every year during my 20s for fun. It was my yearly ritual. I would pick it up at the beginning of the year, right after New Year’s Day. The story never changed, but what I felt would, sometimes. “A Separate Peace” is a story of a friendship between Gene and Phineas. A tale of innocence lost, youthful rebellion, jealousy, and the encroaching tension of World War II.
In one particular scene, there’s a visit to a tree at Devon Military School. It’s the summer of ’42, which Gene, the protagonist, refers to as his “sarcastic summer.” Gene and Finny were students at Devon, and at this moment, they were having fun as boys climbing a tree without a worry in the world, able to ignore the knowledge that they were being prepared for war. (The tree is a significant character in the story) At one point, Gene says: “So the more things remain the same, the more they change after all — plus c’est la même chose, plus ça change. Nothing endures, not a tree, not love, not even a death by violence.”
I wrote this quote on the cover of my first diary when I arrived in Kansas. I understood that change is inevitable at a young age, growing up a military brat, following my father from one post to the next.
I was younger than my son, now 14, when I first read “A Separate Peace.” My son used to love climbing trees when he was younger. He would call out to me to watch how high he could get. I, too, loved to climb trees as a child. I think about those bright, soft moments of childish glee often when I look at the cottonwood out my window, changing with the season. Trees carry so much time within their bodies.
This New Year’s day, I will probably reread “A Separate Peace” again. I want to experience and try to understand those boys from a father’s perspective. When I look out my window at another tree stripped by the cold season, I wonder if I am the old giant, now shrunken by age in my son’s eyes, that Gene describes.
I think about my child, and the tension of war that is encroaching on our peace, again. And I’m hoping we choose to “do better”, for our sons’ and daughters’ sakes. We already know how this story will unfold if we don’t.
Huascar Medina Huascar is a poet, writer, and performer who lives in Topeka. Through its opinion section, the Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate.
