Being Ourselves in the New Year

Today I want
to resolve nothing.

I only want to walk
a little longer in the cold

blessing of the rain,
and lift my face to it.

- Kim Addonizio, Excerpt from “New Year’s Day”

I’ve noticed a common theme in the new year messages of my friends and family. The norm for new year messages is along the lines of embracing the new year, announcing resolutions and goals for the new year, being really happy the old year is finally over, wishing people well, you know, the usual positive messages and relief. This year seems different, though. My friends, my family, folks on Post, are eschewing the ideas of making resolutions and changing themselves. This year, the theme is, “Be yourself,” “Embrace yourself,” “Be authentically yourself.”

Which is what I’m doing. I don’t have any resolutions this year - I have things I am going to continue to do: my morning pages, this newsletter, taking care of my family, embracing life with my friends, being curious.

The theme of “be yourself” is perfect for this time. We have been battered the last several years. We have been forced to isolate, to recognize our mortality, to be shaken in our assumption that good will always prevail, and to question what we’re here for. The terms “the great resignation” and “quiet quitting “ refer to people who are wondering, why am I doing this? Why the hell am I driving hours a day to go to a job that is ok, I guess, but really? Is it worth it? Do I really need to tackle the 405 or the 280, or the 5 or 101 just to go to a fucking cubicle?

When you realize you are not the “apex predator” on this planet, that a virus is, and that anything can happen at any time, life becomes existential. When you are forced to stay home and you realize that staying home isn’t so bad and your dog and your kids see you in daylight, or, if you are forced to work at a warehouse or restaurant or hospital and the folks you are serving are treating you like crap, why the hell are we putting up with this?

We recognized our worth. Our worth is not pinned on us by our job. Our worth is us.

So, yes, I understand, and I totally relate, to just… being. To stop trying to appease the unappeasable. To do things that matter. To create things that matter.

So let us toast the new year to be: us! To appreciate our lives, our loves, our friends, our art, our curiosity, our uniqueness. To discern the difference between intense pressure to handle short-term annoyances that don’t matter, and the need to be, to love, and to express ourselves. To say, “I’ll help you, boss, but I’m not dying for you."

It’s a good feeling, and I’m happy to see it. We are on the mend. Things are shifting and they should be shifting. So hear’s to us! Happy New Year!

I. Film: The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

I’m going to do this, you know that, right? Write about art from any time? Any era? I look at the spectrum of creativity and I don’t look at when something was created. I look at the creation itself, and great art is timeless. So why care about when it was made?

“The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” was released in 2013. I love this movie. I love this movie. If you haven’t seen it you should and if it’s been a while since you’ve seen it, you should rewatch. I know a lot of people don’t like to rewatch movies, and I get it for one-off adventure porn, but true art - how can you only look at one Picasso or listen to Beethoven’s 9th Symphony one time? I rewatch certain movies many times. As I wrote in November, I have rewatched “Surf’s Up” about 100 times. Why not? Art is refreshing, reassuring, and wonderful. Art reminds us that humanity is not completely useless. It reminds us that it is a good thing that we humans exist. And art reminds us of our creativity and wonder. And “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty?” It is a great film and I will watch it anytime.

The movie is based, incredibly loosely, on a short story written by James Thurber for the New Yorker in 1939. I love short stories, and I’m fond of the New Yorker Algonquin Table writers of the ‘20s and ‘30s. They were brilliant, and witty, and they are fun. Thurber’s is a humorous story, but like all great comedic stories, it goes deeper than the surface comedy indicates. The story is about an absent-minded man named Walter Mitty who escapes his dull routine of a life by drifting into day dreams where he becomes the hero, saving cities, towns, regiments, and the world, and getting the girl in the end. Ultimately, it’s about any person who is stuck in life and dreams of what may have been, or what might be. Every person is the hero of their own story, and Thurber captured it perfectly.

The writing is so great. Walter Mitty picks up an old magazine with a cover story about German WWI aircraft, and then he… starts to daydream:

“We only live once, Sergeant,” said Mitty, with his faint, fleeting smile. “Or do we?” He poured another brandy and tossed it off. “I never see a man could hold his brandy like you, sir,” said the sergeant. “Begging your pardon, sir.” Captain Mitty stood up and strapped on his huge Webley-Vickers automatic. “It’s forty kilometres through hell, sir,” said the sergeant. Mitty finished one last brandy. “After all,” he said softly, “what isn’t?”

The story can be read in just a few minutes, but it spawned two movies, both classics. The first was made in 1947 and starred Danny Kaye and Virginia Mayo. It was a comedy, and, as one does with “Walter Mitty,” they took liberties with the story. It is a fun movie.

The 2013 movie is not a comedy. The theme is the same: a man who believes his life is inconsequential, who drops into daydreams at a moment’s notice, daydreams where he is imagining himself the “Great Lover,” or the tough guy telling off the boss, or the super hero who saves the dog and the kid from a burning building. Ben Stiller plays Walter Mitty, and he is perfect. He fancies a co-worker and is trying, and failing, to drum up the courage to ask her out. He works at Life Magazine, as the photograph archivist - an important job for a magazine that was all about photographs. The magazine is being shut down - print media have gone through hell in the 21st century. Mitty is tasked with getting the cover photo for the final issue. And… he can’t find it. And he must find it.

The motto of the movie version of Life Magazine is:

“To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.”

The film is the story of how Walter Mitty took on the motto of the magazine he’d been working in the basement for his whole career and how he embraced life in reality and not only in his head. It is, to me, a close to perfect movie. With the prevailing mood of “be yourself,” yeah, this one’s a great one to kickstart the new year.

Embrace 2023, my friends! We are here now. Your loved-ones are here now. Grab life and enjoy. I know I will.