OPINION:
Like a lot of other people, I stayed up on New Year’s Eve to watch thousands of people in my native city celebrate the dropping of a ball and, more important, the fact that they had lived long enough to see the beginning of another year.
New York was, of course, not alone in its celebration. Pretty much everyone else in the world, in one way or another, also celebrated being alive to see the start of 2026.
That makes sense, of course; the most understandable impulse or emotion humans share is self-preservation. The sense of joy each Jan. 1, however modulated, is a recognition, albeit a mostly subliminal one, that fate, God, destiny or whoever plays a much bigger role in our lives than most of us would be comfortable acknowledging.
We are not really in control of most things that affect us. We did not choose the timing or circumstances of our birth. At best, we will have only a limited say over the timing and circumstances of our death. We did not choose our family. Our friends are almost uniformly associated with the incidentals of our lives, such as the neighborhood in which we grew up or the schools we attended.
The children we have usually wind up being their own people, only partially affected by how their parents and teachers may have tried to raise them.
We are born with many of our intellectual and psychological capabilities. Things as simple as our tolerance for pain or the intensity of our ambition are only partially related to the choices we make. A significant portion of our physical predilections toward diseases or their precursors is genetic. We are subject to the remorseless physics of gravity and entropy at all times.
In short, an alarmingly large percent of what happens to us is random chance. So, it is no small wonder that people celebrate surviving another year.
It is important to remember that we are not responsible for most of the events that happen around us and sometimes to us. We are never responsible for the choices of other people. Nor can we do anything about what has already happened; regret is a game for suckers. The only things we can really control, the only things for which we are completely responsible, are the choices we make and the actions we either take or fail to take. We alone are responsible for how we respond to the world and our fellow humans.
That is good news, in large measure because it means we can change our lives by changing how we interact with the rest of the universe. The tradition of making resolutions for the new year is about 4,000 years old. The Babylonians would promise to return farm equipment. A Chinese New Year tradition is that all debts are to be repaid. Nowadays, we resolve to lose weight or center ourselves or whatever. All of these commitments are a clear acknowledgment that, although we can’t change the world, we can change ourselves.
It is the small changes that ultimately matter the most. It is no accident that Jesus taught people not to worry about the larger world (“You have not here a lasting city”), but to focus on how they could change their own behavior (“Love your neighbor as yourself”). Real change in the world does not start by changing laws or systems but through individuals, one at a time, changing themselves.
In his novel “A Christmas Carol,” Charles Dickens described all of us as “fellow passengers to the grave.” A lyric in The Pogues’ weird and touching song “Fairytale of New York” has an old man in the drunk tank on Christmas Eve offer that he “won’t see another [Christmas].”
Dickens is right, of course. We are all heading toward the same destination. The celebrations on New Year’s Eve are enthusiastic announcements that we are not dead yet; there is still more road to travel. At the same time, the old man in the Pogues’ drunk tank understands that his time is coming to a close, as will the time for all of us.
We may not control everything, but we do control how we respond to everything. The greatest changes in the world have come from individuals who decided to make their corner of the world a better place through their actions. So let’s focus on productive, healthy responses to whatever the world sends us, and have a happy, prosperous 2026.
• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times. His resolution is to tolerate less nonsense.
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