Resolution? Perhaps not...

#36

   The end of the first week in January is about the right time to unfasten, reveal or release those New Year’s Resolutions – if indeed any were made. What seemed like “a good idea” when seen through a glass, darkly, on New Year’s Eve should by now have congealed into a healing crust over last year’s wounds, ready to be scratched and picked before being flicked away to lodge forgotten for another twelve months in that derelict, tinsel-strewn corner of the mind where it is forever Christmas - day twelve.

   The very idea of making New Year’s Resolutions is, of course, hopelessly optimistic and betrays a child-like naivety; a belief that there is something we could do – or some habit we could change - that would make things better. Something as facile as Amazon’s yawn-inducing “The last customer also bought….”

  Calling a meeting or forming a committee usually generates a ‘resolution’ or two. Try doing that on New Year’s Eve and already the process seems complicated and unattractive. A case of ‘Gordian Knot Syndrome’ if ever there was one. Most of us can cut through any problem provided we are sufficiently ignorant of its complexity. Trouble is, for a lasting resolution to problems in the real world, you probably have to unravel the knot, not just slice arbitrarily through the tangle.

• Resolved! Change discord into harmony,
• Resolved! Reduce or separate matters into their constituent parts or components,
• Resolved! Replace a single force by two or more other, more preferable, forces which are jointly equivalent to it,
• Resolved! Adopt a measured approach and achieve an appropriate degree of detail…

…. All of which brings our New Year’s Resolution down to something quantifiable in terms of, say, the number of dots per unit of area. Ultimately, it’s all just a question of dottiness.

• Resolved! Can’t say fairer than that, can we?