Here's my January article for familyguiding.com!
A Toast to Being Human
New Year’s Eve was always my favorite holiday. No presents to worry about, no high-pressured feasts to prepare—just champagne and good company. Of course, the one thing that always seemed to impede on my fun was the question of the new years resolution.
Bringing that kind of pressure into my favorite flippant holiday really bummed me out. To me, resolutions seemed fake and the timing, forced. How do you contemplate a new beginning when nothing “new” has actually happened? How do you declare a new principle on one day out of the year when life’s events aren’t timed by the calendar? Do we make resolutions just as a way to kill time until spring? Or, to help with small-talk at New Years Eve parties? Does anyone actually follow through with this?
I sit here with the clock ticking behind me and facts about mammals looping in my head.
The length of a mammal’s life corresponds almost equally to its size and heart rate. All mammals live for about the same biological length of time. All mammals breathe about 200 million times in their lifetime. The year is almost over, I have so many things to do, there’s not enough time.
A mouse, with its heart pumping fast to keep its little body replenished with blood, only lives for around two human years. A humpback whale (massive body, slow heart) can live 50-100 years. Both breath about 200 million times throughout their life, just one breathes fast, the other slow. But, two years or eighty, we can assume that both animals live very full lives on their own biological time. The slow, aching, 30 minute song of a humpback whale could equate to our memorization of a minute long commercial jingle, or a mouse’s memorization of a very quick set of squeaks. The lifespan of a creature is only accurately measurable by that creature alone.
Humans are different, though. Considering our size, we take more breaths, develop much slower, and experience far more throughout our lives than most other mammals. We stretch our breath to fill almost a century, small bodies living at our own tempo, constructing our lives at the pace of our own personalized biological clock.
The tension of life compresses me until I feel half my size, a portion of my age. As my mind skims through the unfinished paintings, unconnected facts, and patchy ideas of animal imagery in my head, I squeeze my eyelids in effort to slow my thoughts. Like the shifting prisms of a kaleidoscope, my brain shuffles through ideas and imagery, colors and composition.
I hear the clock again, and think of all the things I didn’t accomplish this year–not painting fast enough, not writing fast enough, not calling friends often enough, not eating healthy enough. The New Years resolution, in all its oversimplified, whimsical glory, may be exactly what I need to shake off some of the negative, burdening thoughts and clear my mind to be at peace with the past.
So, this year, I’m giving myself the selfish privilege of developing on my own clock and letting others do the same. We can run, jump, and play, contemplate, create, and stress−we’re blessed with these little agile bodies that endure lives the length of whales. Molding and bending through phases, we have the time and mental capacity to explore our brains and souls as our lives gracefully tick on. Feeling off track? That’s ok, there’s actually time to get back on. Seems like college was just yesterday? You lucky human and your incredibly memory, chill out.
The pressure’s off. It’s time to take advantage of the amazing, slow, long, and malleable lives that we were born with. Pour some champagne and make a toast−we’re all human.
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