Habitual Hope

There are periods in a life when certain routines have embedded themselves so deeply that they can seem to constitute that life itself. For a few years you're constantly changing nappies and reading bedtime stories, say, or getting up very early to get ready for work and to organise a school run, or – as I am now – sitting in front of a desktop computer writing stuff that very few people read but which seems somehow important enough to prioritise over other things I could – probably should – be doing with my time. The common factor, of course, is that all these cycles of habit will come to an end, whether predictably – children grow up, change schools, leave home – suddenly – one day you're at work, the next you're retired – or so gradually that you barely notice the change: one day, I'll wake up and realise that blogging is something I used to do. Often a new thing that at first seems like a welcome break from routine will quickly become the new routine. Our excursion at New Year to our Bristol flat, for example, is a new habit born out of disruption. So it goes.

And, look, here comes the end of another year. Again! The annual cycle being not so much a habit as a rut this planet has been in for longer than anyone can remember, although there's a lot to be said for that kind of dependability, really, isn't there? Christmas is done and dusted – very nice, thanks – our children have gone back to their real lives in London, and, having returned from Dorset to Southampton briefly to re-up our clothing, we now find ourselves in Bristol for New Year. Again!

And once again I find myself fuming in a supermarket queue on New Year's Eve with a modest wire basket of provisions, stuck behind a log-jam of trolley-pushers, all apparently under the impression that no shops will be opening in 2022. Mind you, the way things are going, they could be on to something. COVID has changed the shopping habits of many, quite possibly permanently, to online and home delivery (not us, I have to say), and a trudge up the High Street or through the shopping mall to gather the weekly shop may soon seem as remote as my father's stories of following the milkman's horse with a bucket to collect up dung for the garden. So what was a "shop", grandad?

The wonderful thing about New Year is that, for a day or two at least, we can persuade ourselves that all options are now open, all bets are off, and all psychic laws and constants are in abeyance. Anything is possible in the coming year: review, restart, reset, reboot! Obviously, the same possibilities for renewal exist at every other time of year, too, it's just that this little liminal pause, however illusory, is like stepping through a threshold bearing the opposite inscription to that over Dante's entrance to Hell: All hope is to be found beyond this doorway. It's always worth a gamble, isn't it, another throw of the dice? As that very wise man William James put it:

For practical life at any rate, the chance of salvation is enough. No fact in human nature is more characteristic than its willingness to live on a chance. The existence of the chance makes the difference, as Edmund Gurney says, between a life of which the keynote is resignation and a life of which the keynote is hope.
Afterword to The Varieties of Religious Experience

So, as we step serially through that threshold in our different time zones, let us all hope for more hope in 2022. There's no question that we're going to need it: it would be a good new habit to cultivate. So pass me those dice, and I hope you will accept my best wishes for the coming year. Again!

The long and winding road...