New Year's resolutions can help us tackle national challenges.
This New Year feels both uniquely hard and oddly familiar. We are weary of isolation, of dashed plans for gathering, of having no real excuse to wear glitter and heels. We have been here before. |
And yet, still, many of us will resolve to change something. What that change is may be personal — an exercise or weight loss commitment, say, or a renewed effort in a faltering relationship. Maybe it's a push to finally write that book or look for work that's more fulfilling. Perhaps it is as simple as a promise to carve out more time for our partner, our parents or our children. For some, it might be more community engagement. |
Whatever the hope, even the most jaded among us have a hard time avoiding the sense that turning the page on the calendar is meant to augur a new era. That is why, typically, we make ourselves promises — or resolutions — to work harder, or work less, to call on friends and family more. |
But just as often, as Anne-Marie Slaughter points out in her guest essay published today, we begin to back down from those promises by February, only to kick ourselves for our failures as we return to old patterns. |
"The deeper problem, as my father would put it, is the 'triumph of hope over expectation,'" writes Slaughter. "The only way to change the path of expectation is to face and dissect why our resolutions failed before. That road leads to many unexpected destinations far beyond willpower." |
Slaughter's essay argues we should see a parallel in our individual struggles to make personal change — like successfully realizing a New Year's resolution — with the larger problem of addressing communal divisions, political stasis and national polarization. |
"Personal and political change are different processes, differing according to the people and the polities concerned," she writes. "But both require identifying big long-term goals and the smaller, immediate steps that will allow us to meet them. Perhaps that means we change the books we read, the commentators we turn to, the communities we join or the way we engage in conversation." |
Addressing the nation's endemic polarization, Slaughter argues, means recognizing that despite all that divides us, we share more in common than we often admit. It also means reconsidering exactly why we continue to fail to understand one another — and committing to concrete, small steps that will help us all do better in the new year. |
Here's what we're focusing on today: |
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