Can't Tell Which Way Is Up - Dec 30 2025

 

Can’t Tell Which Way Is Up

Dec 30 2025

The time of year for resolutions,

but just what sort?

The kind where you make a solemn commitment?

Arrive at a conclusion

resolve a dispute?

Or solve again,

just as we re-make, re-play, re-direct?

I don’t make New Year resolutions;

what sense is there

in a single day of self-improvement

then complacency all the rest?

And why New Year’s day?

After all, calendars are mere conventions,

dates meaningless 

in and of themselves. 

So the notion of a new year

and a fresh start

is as hypothetical as the debate

over how many angels 

can dance on the head of a pin;

of theological interest,

but a matter of faith, not proof.

January 1, after the Roman god Janus;

the start of the 2-headed month

that, like its namesake 

looks both forward and back.

So which direction for me,

striding bravely into the future

or settled in the past?

Because even a bad year

as the last one was 

is better than uncertainty.

And as the years accumulate 

and begin to overlap

 — their colours

bleeding into each other

like a Jackson Pollock abstract

you can’t tell which way is up — 

it feels like nothing’s been resolved.

Because the past is always with us,

the now merely a flicker,

and the future little different

except for shinier, and quicker.

So not the gee-whiz science fiction

of commuting to Mars

and enlightened humanity,

just a faster pace

and slicker technology;

a future

where we’ll be fatter and more distracted

yet not any happier.

After all, aren’t we still hairless apes

on the African savanna 

huddling around the fire?

I will go to sleep on the 31st

and awaken in a new year

with a groggy head and sore neck

from trying to look both forward and back.

Because unlike a god

who in all his omniscient splendour

can see in 2 directions at once,

all I really have 

is the here and now

  — the man I’ve become

despite my best intentions,

and a winter day 

no different than the rest.

I know it’s a pessimistic poem, especially unsuitable for a time of year when we’re urged to look ahead and turn the page. But then, I also tend to be dark, negative, and pessimistic; so it should be no surprise that I’m suitably modest in my expectations for self-improvement and a better world.

In the poem I refer to the last year as a “bad one”. In order to situate future readers, that year was 2025, which should explain my negativity: the end of Trump 2.0’s first of four exhausting years (yikes, still 3 to go!!). So while I had my personal challenges — as all of us naturally have — I was thinking more of geopolitics, the environment, and our collective moral failure. Our presumed notion of inevitable progress — a jagged line of two steps forward one step back, but ascending nevertheless —  is now questionable: are we regressing into a new Dark Age? Or is right wing populism a momentary enthusiasm that will die its natural death?

It’s a beautiful day in the middle of an undifferentiated winter. So nothing special. The only resolution needed is to be fully present in it.