New Year's Resolutions
Conditional future...
So here we are at the end of one of the worst years that I can remember living through, facing up to the next one. This is not just a private grumble — politics, threats to peace and financial problems have escalated for most of us who live below the waterline of the billionaires who have bought the world. My own year has been lived in an emotional tsunami, which I’ve been riding on a rickety surf-board, without having had much practice until ten months ago. But it’s not all been sad or scary. As people do, I’ve discovered that when I have to keep my balance in metaphorical rough sea, I can surprise myself by doing so. And I’ve found out just how much I can love — a revelation that has come very late in my life and in my relationship with Dónall. Like fear and and anxiety, love can trundle along in the background, affecting conscious behaviour unawares. But when the one you love is threatened, everything changes. You focus.
Every year since I was about eleven years old, I’ve considered making New Year Resolutions. I would write an earnest list in my School Friend Diary: promises to stop biting my nails, get my homework done on time, and so on. (Biting my nails always resumed immediately, until I grew out of it.) When I began writing poetry and blogs, in my sixties, I took up the habit of writing New Year Resolutions again, but generally in a cynical joky way. (In January 2024 I resolved to solve the world’s problems, just leaving one or two over to be dealt with in 2025. As you will have noticed, I failed to keep any of those resolutions). This week in the limbo between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, we’re getting ready for a series of hospital visits, beginning in the first week of the year, following up the treatments that Dónall has been undergoing for cancer, diabetes and Bell’s palsy. It doesn’t feel as if any resolutions I might make would have much chance of sticking. It’s more a case of the New Year itself resolving what we can do. Trying to find a way into the subject, I wrote a frenzied ‘freewrite’ last night, and realised that what I was writing was a kind of bucket-list of what we want to do, if 2026 allows us to. But only if... And this poem arrived at 4am: FUTURE CONDITIONAL — New Year’s Resolutions 2026 travel look see listen as if... think ask believe discuss as if... paint read write learn as if... love care keep hold as if... despite... although... until... I suppose the ellipses in this poem stand for all the solutions to possible impediments to the promises I’m making to myself, from World War 3 to personal tragedies. I prefer to let the ellipses speak for me, rather than articulate them. That way I don’t risk leaving anything out unforeseen. The world is indeed suddener than we fancy it... THANK YOU FOR READING ‘IS THAT ALL’ in 2025
What a lovely piece. Best wishes to you both for a much better year than last
Much love to you both! xoxo