That Time I Cheered in a New Year
All alone. And what it taught me about relationships over resolutions.
Twenty-eighteen didn’t start like I imagined it would. Utterly alone.
It’s not that I have a problem with being alone, but it was the day that made being alone memorable, and life-changing. New Year’s Eve.
For nearly three decades, I had spent that holiday surrounded by family members and friends, dipping cheese and chocolate fondue, plopping pieces around board games and increasingly being not as impressed with the opportunity to stay up until midnight. Does anyone else remember when that felt like an incredible privilege and gift to see just what the world was up to past bedtime?
It didn’t start different. I awoke imagining it would be an average end-of-the-year sort of day.
I warmed up the day with a weekend morning run. Relaxed in my sacred space: Starbucks with a novel. Gathered at church for an afternoon service. Swiped unlock my phone to text coworkers and friends — getting the scoop on what festivities the latter part of the clock would offer.
That’s where the normalcy stopped. So-and-so was still out of town from Christmas vacation. Said party was on the other side of town with no one I knew. But I wouldn’t ring in the new year alone.
I finally managed to learn of a group doing a little end-of-year reflection and prayer time. Not my usual approach, nor with the closest circle, but it would be with community. And that made me happy.
Until at 11:35 p.m., after downing the bubbly to compliment the hand-made cookie dough bites I whipped together, everyone parted ways.
At e-le-ven thir-ty five. Post meridiem.
I would not be alone. I could not. So, I ran to my apartment with the tick-tock clicking down my social execution.
With four minutes to spare, I flipped open my laptop, pulled up that familiar bar-of-a-know-it-all and typed, y-o-u-t-u-b-e.
Three minutes ebbed, and I stumbled across a live feed of Times Square, quite an ironic site for my demise.
Ten. It’s a pixelated image.
Nine. Wait, I didn’t pour any champagne.
Eight. How did I get to this place?
Seven. So much for community.
Six. Great, the picture lagged. That’s what I get for still using a hotspot.
Two. Well, this is underwhelming.
One. What’s a resolution without people?
That countdown brought freeing resurrection, but like anything good that comes back to life, it’s gotta die first.
You could say what brought me to that point was resolutions. Resolve to bring lasting change. Change for a community comprising hundreds of cultural backgrounds and expressions.
Resolve to explore what might be out there for me romantically. Especially in the community I called home.
But it’s possible to have resolve without relationships. In those early moments of 2-0-1-8 flashing on the LEDs towering over the throng of people kissing and kumbaya-ing to Sanatra’s New York, New York, I discovered resolutions didn’t matter.
Jesus said humanity doesn’t live by bread alone. Well, they don’t live by resolutions either. If resolutions unfulfilled are so awful, why didn’t they haunt me that eve of 2018?
Because, as much as that Peloton commercial might try to persuade, my new resolutions won’t eclipse the need to belong.
The end of 2017 made me feel more disconnected than I had ever felt before. Disconnected not from ideology, not from effort, but from people.
As much as we long for similar viewpoints and goals, I’m convinced that even if all the world lived as one like Lennon imagined, we’d still feel just as empty if our resolve to be one superseded our relating rightly. And wanting to relate even when we don’t fully get each other.
I think it’s possible to have commonality without relationship.
Looking for more than just outcomes and shared ground with people is what led me to meet my wife. Looking outside of those resolutions and community bound more so by common value than necessarily commitment to one another.
Up until that fateful day, I longed for a spouse to adventure with, to go conquer the world philanthropically, to do. Stereotypical masculine aspirations.
That day reminded me all the adventuring and shared values won’t bind two people together any more than accomplishments and resolutions could fill those empty sofa cushions.
People who do stick it out, live beyond goals. They live beyond outcomes. They endure, because the other matters.
N.D. Wilson writes in Empire of Bones that
[o]ur goal was never to live; our goal is to love. It is the goal of all noble men and women. Give all that can be given. Give even your live itself.
It’s the secret no company or organization can muster. Otherwise, Apple wouldn’t need to keep making better iPhones, and Amazon could have stuck with book software. Their customers would be happy with who they are for who they are.
But they’re stuck to the melody of resolutions. And they’re only as good as what’s next.
Something two love-bound, withered hands — entwined to overcome all the celebrations, devastations and ordinariness life brings — never need.
