There’s a particular kind of rhetoric that gathers around the turn of the year — bright, insistent, full of promise. It speaks of fresh starts and better versions of ourselves, of resolutions made and kept. It seems to assume we can step forward already certain of where we’re headed.
But standing here, at the beginning, certainty feels beside the point.
January doesn’t feel like a launch.
It feels like a tuning.
In music, resolution isn’t a decision.
It isn’t something imposed.
It’s something felt.
A phrase wanders. It leans into uncertainty. And then — often before you can name it — it begins to find its way home. Not because it should, but because it wants to. The body recognises the moment before the mind does. A settling. A release.
That’s the kind of resolution on my mind as the new year arrives.
Not the tightening of resolve, but the loosening that allows something to rest.
It’s been a year where many people I know have felt stretched — unsettled, quietly tired. There’s no need to catalogue why. It seems to belong to the weather of things, at least for now.
There was a poem I read aloud to my son most evenings before sleep. It wasn’t chosen for its wisdom. It simply arrived, and stayed. Night after night, it closed the day for us. It returned us — gently — to where we already were…
An Ordinary Day
by Norman MacCaigI took my mind a walk
Or my mind took me a walk–
Whichever was the truth of it.The light glittered on the water
Or the water glittered in the light.
Cormorants stood on a tidal rockWith their wings spread out,
Stopping no traffic. Various ducks
Shilly-shallied here and thereOn the shilly-shallying water.
An occasional gull yelped. Small flowers
Were doing their level bestTo bring to their kerbs bees like
Ariel charabancs. Long weeds in the clear
Water did Eastern dances, unregardedBy shoals of darning needles. A cow
Started a moo but thought
Better of it–And my feet took me homeAnd my mind observed to me,
Or I to it, how ordinary
Extraordinary things are orHow extraordinary ordinary
Things are, like the nature of the mind
And the process of observing.
I think many of us reach January holding ourselves in a kind of brace — intentions clenched, muscles engaged. There’s care in that posture, but also strain. Improvement easily slips into self-surveillance. Resolve slips into pressure.
What if resolution were something else?
Not a demand we make of ourselves, but a relationship we return to.
The word once meant loosening. Untying. Dissolving what had grown tight.
Resolution comes from the Latin resolutio — to loosen, to untie, to release.
A returning. A letting-go.
In music, that meaning never left. A dissonance doesn’t get corrected. It gets released.
The same might be true of a year.
Those evenings with my son weren’t a strategy. The poem wasn’t a tool. It didn’t make anything happen. It simply placed us back inside the day we’d just lived and allowed it to settle. The mind had been taken for a walk, and brought home again.
That feels like a useful image for January.
Not a march forward.
A return to orientation.
Finding the home chord before moving on.
As the light shifts and the day moves on, the streets fill.
As the month unfolds, the routines resume their quiet labour. The ordinary continues, untroubled by our plans for it.
And somehow, quietly, that feels enough.
May this year resolve kindly.
In its own time.
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