Dear friends,
As we approach the close of one year and the beginning of the next, I would like to share with you the writer Lydia Davis’ captivating short story, New Year’s Resolution, reproduced below. Davis is an astute observer of humanity in all our foibles and flaws, and of our relationships to each other and to the world. She sees us clearly, often tenderly, and always honestly.
Whether or not you are a person who makes new year’s resolutions, I invite you to take a moment to read the story and consider the value of seeing yourself as nothing. I find it to be an uncomfortable and challenging thought. As Davis writes, and as many of us experience, a person has “already had so much trouble learning to see herself as something in the first place.” But the story is a gentle invitation, not an unequivocal demand. Perhaps, if we try a little each day, we will find the practice to be wonderfully liberating.
With care,
Lisa
New Year’s Resolution
by Lydia Davis
I ask my friend Bob what his New Year’s Resolutions are and he says, with a shrug (indicating that this is obvious or not surprising): to drink less, to lose weight… He asks me the same, but I am not ready to answer him yet. I have been studying my Zen again, in a mild way, out of desperation over the holidays, though mild desperation. A medal or a rotten tomato, it’s all the same, says the book I have been reading. After a few days of consideration, I think the most truthful answer to my friend Bob would be: My New Year’s Resolution is to learn to see myself as nothing. Is this competitive? He wants to lose some weight, I want to learn to see myself as nothing. Of course, to be competitive is not in keeping with any Buddhist philosophy. A true nothing is not competitive. But I don’t think I’m being competitive when I say it. I am feeling truly humble, at that moment. Or I think I am—in fact, can anyone be truly humble at the moment they say they want to learn to be nothing? But there is another problem, which I have been wanting to describe to Bob for a few weeks now: at last, halfway through your life, you are smart enough to see that it all amounts to nothing, even success amounts to nothing. But how does a person learn to see herself as nothing when she has already had so much trouble learning to see herself as something in the first place? It’s so confusing. You spend the first half of your life learning that you are something after all, now you have to spend the second half learning to see yourself as nothing. You have been a negative nothing, now you want to be a positive nothing. I have begun trying, in these first days of the New Year, but so far it’s pretty difficult. I’m pretty close to nothing all morning, but by late afternoon what is in me that is something starts throwing its weight around. This happens many days. By evening, I’m full of something and it’s often something nasty and pushy. So what I think at this point is that I’m aiming too high, that maybe nothing is too much, to begin with. Maybe for now I should just try, each day, to be a little less than I usually am.
