No resolutions

Happy New Year. This year I am making no resolutions, except that one. Not making any resolutions is indeed a resolution, one I am not sure that I will be able to keep. It reminds me of when Microsoft was set up and the story goes that they decided there would be no rules. One of the team suggested no ties but that was a rule and was kicked out. There are times when wearing a tie can be very useful. Of course you can’t run a business, indeed you can’t live your life without rules.

Whatever I set out to do this year, some I will achieve while with others I will get somewhere or nowhere. That is the nature of life. I will also think of many other things to be done over the course of the next twelve months. I will probably think of half a dozen new things while I am cleaning my teeth every morning.

Why do we worry so much about the start of a new year? January 1 seems such an arbitrary date, because it is. You can blame the Romans for New Year’s Day which has been marked as the beginning of January since about 150 BCE. It would make more sense to have it aligned with the equinoxes or solstices to mirror the seasonal changes. In fact, both the 25th ofDecember and March have also been new year’s days.

The truth is that every day is both a new year’s day and old year’s night. We only choose to use January 1 for administrative purposes, as part of global standard time.

Having made no resolutions doesn’t mean that I don’t want to see things happen. In no particular order, I would like to see CyberNorth on a sustainable footing, with me taking a smaller role. I would like to see the arguments for proportional representation and a return to the folds of the European Union take hold. I would like to see people being kinder to each other and being less partisan and tribal in their ways. Finally, I would like a year without serious illness in the family.

I’m not going to keep score though.