The first winter I spent in New York, after moving here from Arizona, I bought a natural daylight bulb for my desk lamp because the January days here are so short and dark. (Little did I know that later I’d join the air guard unit that spends our winter in a land where the sun never sets!) Though I’ve adjusted pretty well to the seasons here, winter can be a tough pull for me. Somewhere in the back of my head I know the days are getting longer, but it’s hard to notice the pace of just a minute or two per day. When the natural daylight bulb blew out sometime that summer, I replaced it with a generic white frosted. I realized I’d hardly noticed the gradual lengthening of sunlight but that the days were as long as I’d wished they’d been in January.
New Year’s Day and January come on us with sudden fireworks and the illusion that maybe this year will be different. The newborn 2007 shakes his rattle and pushes old man 2006 off stage. But, in the words of one of my favorite theologians, Bono: “nothing changes on New Year’s Day.” Of course that’s not entirely true: New Year’s Day has a minute more of sunlight than New Year’s Eve. But the sentiment of the lyric is that dramatic changes in our lives seldom happen overnight.
U2 wrote the song “New Year’s Day” in part to support the nonviolent movement Solidarity in Poland. Founded in 1980 as a labor union in a communist country, Solidarity could not be crushed by the regime in power. It took nearly a decade, but this labor movement was able to leverage enough influence to spark the first of five overthrows of Eastern-bloc countries in 1989. Nothing changed in one day.
Our lives require constant small choices that gradually steer us into our values. I can choose today to be more attentive to my daughters for a few extra minutes, to tell my wife one more time that I love her, to make that extra effort at work beyond what is merely required. The changes in our lives that last are the changes we work on little by little, a minute here and a minute there. Then, gradually, we notice the sky is brighter and we are in the place we had hoped to be in months ago.
New Year’s Day and January come on us with sudden fireworks and the illusion that maybe this year will be different. The newborn 2007 shakes his rattle and pushes old man 2006 off stage. But, in the words of one of my favorite theologians, Bono: “nothing changes on New Year’s Day.” Of course that’s not entirely true: New Year’s Day has a minute more of sunlight than New Year’s Eve. But the sentiment of the lyric is that dramatic changes in our lives seldom happen overnight.
U2 wrote the song “New Year’s Day” in part to support the nonviolent movement Solidarity in Poland. Founded in 1980 as a labor union in a communist country, Solidarity could not be crushed by the regime in power. It took nearly a decade, but this labor movement was able to leverage enough influence to spark the first of five overthrows of Eastern-bloc countries in 1989. Nothing changed in one day.
Our lives require constant small choices that gradually steer us into our values. I can choose today to be more attentive to my daughters for a few extra minutes, to tell my wife one more time that I love her, to make that extra effort at work beyond what is merely required. The changes in our lives that last are the changes we work on little by little, a minute here and a minute there. Then, gradually, we notice the sky is brighter and we are in the place we had hoped to be in months ago.
posted by Jake at 9:34 PM
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