Re-solution
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Re-solution
As the sun completes another 365-day revolution over our heads, we stop to reflect on the past year and our behaviors and resolve to do better next year.
Each new year, millions of people make resolutions, commitments to change. By February, most have failed and given up. This is because of a misunderstanding of what a resolution is. It’s not a chance to stop old patterns from emerging; it’s a re-solution for when they do. An opportunity to go through all the same things differently.
This distinction matters, because if you expect January 1st to wipe the slate clean, you’ll despair when the same patterns, struggles, and thoughts return in February. When we understand it as re-volution instead of starting over, their return is not failure. It is the pattern completing itself, offering another chance to respond differently.
Etymologically, from the word solvere, meaning to loosen or dissolve, the word resolution actually means “to break something apart.” Re-solution is a new solution for the same patterns.
It’s the same year again, the same months repeat, the same seasons turn. What changes is our ability to navigate through the same terrain with more grace.
These patterns are natural and repeat at every scale. As the whole is represented in each part, the entirety of our lifetimes plays out in a single day. We awaken as if newly born, we go throughout the day growing tired and weary, and each night we lay down and our minds depart the body in a daily representation of our death. The pattern of our entire life in a single day.
This demonstrates that these patterns are fundamental, and the attempt to stop them from unfolding is futile and causes suffering. Depression becomes being trapped in an unchanging beat, the same day repeating without hope of variation. Anxiety, the resistance to inevitable recurrence and the dread that difficult states will return. In this light, suffering is the demand that the cycle stop, instead of learning how to move within it.
A re-solution is not “I will never eat junk food again.” Rather, it is “when I have the urge to eat junk food, I will choose this healthier alternative.”
A re-solution is not “I will stop being anxious.” Rather, it is “when anxiety arises, I will practice these methods to control it.”
Re-solutions assume you WILL get tired, you WILL regress, you WILL face the same triggers again.
Our despair, grief, and depression grow each day as we settle into them. Likewise, our peace, joy, and happiness also compound. Each time we recognize the pattern, pause, and choose, grace accumulates.
Re-solution is not a chance to stop old patterns from occurring; it is the new solutions for how we respond to their revolution and the resolution of the resistance to them.
Re-volution
Growth doesn’t happen in a linear fashion; each step forward requires a revolution. To begin back from the beginning with newfound perspective. Revolution isn’t just the repetition of the pattern; it is the new-volition to encounter it with a different response.
Revolution is what creates meaning through pattern. The verse returns. The chorus returns. The bridge takes you somewhere new, but only to bring you back to the chorus to hear it again with fresh ears. This is the cycle in which growth occurs.
But we often think of “revolution” as the destruction of a state, whether it is a cultural revolt against its government or a rebellion against our own state of mind. By framing revolution as the destruction of an undesirable state, we enter into a war rather than resolution.
We think that health and wellness must mean these difficult states will stop arising, that old patterns will cease to occur, that we will conquer the undesired states. This might lead us to fall into despair, believing we are falling back into old ways, when familiar patterns repeat. But these patterns repeat indefinitely. What changes is our perspective and reactions to them.
When re-volution is mistaken for revolution, we assume change requires the destruction of the previous state, rather than the willingness to enter that same state again with new volition.
Re-volution is not the destruction of undesired states. It is new-volition for the re-solution of them.