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I don’t do resolutions. Not at this time of year, that is. And I must have found at least three emailed posts in the last two days saying much the same thing, or explaining why resolutions don’t work, or why they’re incompatible with human nature. I wonder why I’m adding to the number, because I’m sure the ones I’ve read can’t be the only ones out there.

A little ironic, it seems, that this New Year Thing seems to be critiquing the New Year Resolution Thing - perhaps it’s developing into a new tradition. A tradition of transition out of tradition. Given that the tradition of making resolutions in the new year goes back 4,000 years, to the Babylonians, though, maybe not.

For me, it’s not so much the resolution per se, the concept of the resolution that’s the problem. It’s the time of year. And the imposition. Would we be even thinking about resolution if Tradition didn’t tell us we should be? Again, maybe. Come the moment the calendar on the wall becomes redundant, or the calendar on the screen says January again, there has been a beginning, and there are deep roots to the impulse to begin well, to make a good start. And (but) January 1st is simply a label, a relatively arbitrary label, a culturally limited label. It is the turning of the earth that really determines the beginning, the shift from darkening to lightening that will lengthen our days, that is already summoning catkins and snowdrops. And that beginning gets swamped in the tarradiddle of Christmas and all that goes to wrap, feed and wrap up the season.

Which does, yes, mean that there is an emergence, once the noise has died down, which might feel like a beginning. But it is an emergence into still-short days, into cold and often wet (though recent days here have been clear and blue and beautiful), into more waiting for greater flow in the warming of earth and air, more rising of sap, more growing and bursting into the fanfare of Spring. Now that is a beginning it feels more appropriate to be resolved in - to emerge like Mole from the dutiful but dusty dark into a world of colour and possibility, a world of rising energy overcoming the sleep of winter, and invitation into newness.

And there’s September, and the thrills of newness that attended us into a new year, a new class, new books, new subjects, new stationery. That first page in a pristine notebook, waiting for the realisation of new ideas. I’m being a little romantic, I realise, and I do know that the return to school for many is/was no more a welcome fresh start than is a cold, dark winter morning. I’m grateful that it was mine, though, and I know I’m not alone.

Spring and September provide the newness that makes resolution-making seem more relevant to me than January 1st, which is why I don’t make resolutions now. All the same, there is something about the return to routine - the not having to work out what day of the week it is because three bank holidays have played havoc with the rhythm of week and weekend; the knowing what will be open, and for how long; the not having to work out how much food or how much drink. The ebbing tide of the seasonal unusual makes room for a return to ordered spaciousness, the paradoxical spaciousness of regularity.

There is something paradoxical, too, in the fact that this returning spaciousness is allowing me to return to this space, Friday being the weekly ring-fenced writing time in my diary. The fence is back up today, having been bulldozed by repeated demands from Outside, not least by the advent of Christmas (as opposed to the discipline of Advent, which should have helped), and a week away before it. And in amongst the posts about the inadvisability of making resolutions, there have been invitations to share regularity - to the establishment of regular writing practice - which have met my boundaried freed first Friday of 2026 and given it an energy which

feels

like

resolution

?