This new year, come home to yourself.

The new year marks the earth’s complete revolution around the sun. Yet we are seldom invited to explore the underlying wisdom of this planetary process, rather than our culture’s self-serving projections onto it. Far from urging radical change, the earth’s new year signals a moment of completion and return. The cycle it began 365 days, 5 hours, 59 minutes and 16 seconds ago, is now complete. The earth has, in a sense, come home to itself. Returning to the position and memory of a past self, there are neither regrets owed to the past nor revisions to the future. Rather than advocating change, this process can teach us alignment with our past selves and the radical acceptance this would entail. Indeed, our planet’s revolution is bursting with interpretations and lessons that our culture leaves unexplored.

Resolution as return

Each new year, the earth reaches a brief moment of resolution. It has resolved its annual orbit around the sun from an unfinished to a “finished” state. This, of course, is only inteligible if we allow the arbitrary start and end dates we impose onto earth time, something that manifests in different ways across cultures. Notwithstanding the limitations of the Greogrian calendar, what emerges is that the earth’s annual resolution may be quite different from our own. The former marks a kind of return and reconciliation with the position it found itself in a year ago. The latter is a kind of solemn promise to change into better subjects of the social (dis)order. We are not asked what we want to keep or return to this year, only what we want to change. What could return represent to you, and what does it offer?

As a child I was obsessed with writing and with the idea of becoming a writer. I lost that dream in adolescence and never looked back. Over a decade later, I find myself writing again for reasons I could only pretend to fully understand. In a sense, I have come home to myself; come home to an earlier vision I had for my future that I strayed from for twelve or so years. Why don’t we celebrate this kind of resolution at this time of year?

While easy to take for granted, it is quite profound to have a nature. To reliably be a certain way. That uncanny moment when you reunite with an old friend and you find something in them surprisingly unchanged by all that’s happened to both of you. Maybe they still do or say that thing they’ve always said or done. It feels like a coincidence, like this present version of them has somehow collided with the past. As if by mere chance this person happened to hang onto themself, and isn’t that a wonder. Sometimes this is gratingly annoying, and worse, toxic and violent. I won’t focus on this here, because today I accept that it’s not in my nature to.

What parts of you are growing tired of being denied and rejectd, and are instead craving the soothing balm of acceptance? How can we see the new year as a chance to align with instead of fight ourselves? So encouraged are we to flee from ourselves that acceptance seems to corrupt what the new year is all about. With that I will say to my younger self: thank you for setting your intentions so clearly. You’ve allowed me to look back with sharp focus and feel a distinct connection between us. In 2023, here’s to becoming who we’ve been, and being who we’ve become.

Each year, we look ahead with great anticipation to what tweaks we will make to the machine-like qualities we’ve been coerced into identifying with. For some this is a fun ritual, and I am all for fun rituals. I always find myself seeking new (and old, in the same cyclical way of the earth) ways of seeing. And with that I’ve come to believe that we gain a lot from animating nature. From letting the earth, sea, birds, trees, wind, talk to us. Our species’ distinctive arrogance calls this technique personification, as if we are the only beings with consciousness and alive traits. So, while many cynics will claim the earth can’t do anything, I maintain that one of many interpretations of what’s happening this new year is that the earth inviting us to return to ourselves and embrace the inherent bend of our nature instead of fighting it. An invitation to consider that perhaps we were not put on this planet to change our nature but to discover and nurture it. In particular, the most life-giving

version of it.

To that point, it goes without saying that we all have aspects of ourselves that are important to change and heal – particularly those that cause harm to others, ourselves, and the earth. Violence, greed, abuse, bullying, extraction, exploitation, are not floating out there in “society”, and neither are racism, classism, ablism, and so many more. They live and breathe in each of us, in different ways. In response, the work to challenge and unlearn ingrained patterns of power and injustice is critical. But as you know, these are not quite the self-improvement projects we are encouraged to undertake this time of year. And these deeper forms of social and spiritual change must be sincere commitments that are not subject to the whims of the new year.

My point is not that there’s nothing we should aim to change about ourselves, but that we can reimagine the new year as an opportunity to do something quite different. An invitation to take a pause from trying to change — a goal so ingrained in us by now we don’t really need a reminder of it — and radically accept ourselves instead. How fun would it be for all of us to meaningfully entertain all the ways we want to stay the same this year?  How do we come home to ourselves in a culture hellbent on convincing us there is something inherently wrong with us? 

Resolution as vowing to change

The kind of resolution we’ve been met with since near birth is very much by design. First, it’s much more profitable. Capitalism needs you to see yourself as deeply and inherently flawed, to ensure a lifetime value of reliable and growing cash flows. Whatever you want to do more or less of, there’s an app, product, or service, that can help those who can afford it. In a capitalist system, growth at all costs, including our sense of self, is key. And diet culture, rooted in anti-fatness, reigns supreme this time of year.

ps i wish i could find data from non-western countries but i could not! aren’t the differences between the US+UK and Germany fascinating? i couldn’t find germany for 2023 but here are 2019 charts for the US and UK. these also have a higher number of people surveyed.

Second, this shallow take on what the new year represents also helps individualize societal issues such that people are left feeling personally responsible for socially-caused conditions. Health is not an individual choice unless you can afford for it to be (both figuratively and literally). Racial, gender, class, and ablist oppression preclude or jeopardize true health. What do we do with all the hardships that will find us again, as they reliably do every year, because they are outside the control of the individual and inside that of the society? Lastly, the status quo version of the new year keeps us self-centered, always focusing on the I, instead of the Us. We are rarely invited into community understandings of what a new year could represent. 

Closing thoughts

What could it mean to come home to oneself? A deep breath, a centering, a grounding. Journaling, dancing, singing, resting. A love letter addressed to yourself or to your loved one. A group circle of friends expressing what they radically accept and perhaps even love about themselves. An acknowledgement of the stubborn parts of our nature that will in all likelihood remain, some of which have kept us safe along the way. Perhaps the new year is not actually inviting us into change as much as into acceptance, alignment, and return; a kind of radical resignation to our innermost nature. The things you hope to do again are just as important, if not more, as those you hope to start doing. The things that are good enough as they were, are perhaps all we can hope for. Revolution has a double meaning. There is the radical change, and there is also the circular motion that always culminates in return.

On approximately January 1st each year, our precious earth finds itself in roughly the same place it was the year prior, like the satisfying image of two circles approaching each other that reach a moment of blissful overlap, or eclipse. This moment of eclipse offers a metaphor of alignment: a kiss hello, where present and prior self embrace. The earth’s new year suggests a brief moment of completion and closure; of wholeness and integrity. Perhaps then, a new year happens each time we find ourselves in a moment that brings us home to ourselves, that feels uncannily familiar to who we are and who we’ve always been.

Each time I look up at the moon, a quick succession of images of prior moments I’ve spent doing so come to mind. I have traversed distance in between, lived a life, but when staring and breathing with the moon, i find myself united with all my prior selves who have done the same. Growing up in South Africa and living in the US, the moon brings me home to myself and to the gratitude I feel to be alive and safe and reunited with it and with myself. Each time I am with the moon, I feel a familiar combination of awe and bittersweetness. I am reminded of the company I’ve experienced the moon with — both the cynical friends who have met my moon-induced excitement with a kind of disdain and dismissal, my childlike wonder uncool and overly spiritual, and others who have matched my reverence with their own. Both these kinds of people have taught me who I am, and who I look forward to returning to being. The linear distance I have traveled in between these moments of moon-watching is merely the circumference of a circle that has led me back to myself. 

So I wonder, this year, how will you come home to yourself? How will you help those you love feel at home within themselves? How will we find completion and alignment in ourselves and in each other, just as we are, blissfully becoming who we’ve been and being who we have become?