A Fresh Start?

According to Oliver Burkeman, there’s no such thing as a fresh start. Yes! He says exactly that in his Imperfectionist Newsletter. He also says, and I quote, “You have already failed.”

Say what?

The unspoken hope is that you won’t just change a few things for the better, but make a total break with the past. You’ll reboot your life, leave disorganization and procrastination behind you once and for all, and do everything differently from now on….

He goes on to say:

I’ve only more recently grasped the deeper point here, which isn’t simply that fresh starts don’t work as intended, but that there never are any fresh starts in the first place. Contrary to self-help cliché, the thing we perfectionists need to learn isn’t that we’re probably going to experience failure. It’s that we’ve already failed, totally and irredeemably.

This is liable to sound incredibly depressing, but since it’s actually fantastic news, I hope you’ll allow me to elaborate.

Behind our more strenuous attempts at personal change, there’s almost always the desire for a feeling of control. We want to lever ourselves into a position of dominance over our lives, so that we might finally feel secure and in charge, and no longer so vulnerable to events. But whichever way you look at it, this kind of control is an illusion. It implies the ability to somehow stand back from or get outside of your life – which you never can, obviously, because you just are your life.

What this means, for one thing, is that the perfectionist’s fantasy of reaching her deathbed with a perfect record of accomplishments under her belt isn’t just extremely unlikely, but doomed from the start, because (to mix metaphors) the years she’s already lived are water under the bridge. All the time you’ve already wasted, the people you’ve disappointed, the opportunities you failed to seize – it’s all already happened, and can never be undone.

It also means that the person attempting to leave the past behind, by making a fresh start, is one who’s been completely shaped by that past. The self you’re seeking to transform is the same one that’s doing the transforming – so you’re like Baron Munchausen, trying to pull himself out of the swamp by yanking on his own hair. You can never start life afresh, because you’re hopelessly stuck in this life; there’s no breaking through to another one in which everything’s different and better.

The reason this is so liberating, for anyone with even a hint of perfectionism, is that it means you get to give up on the exhausting struggle to take charge of your life, so as to steer it in a new direction. You get to abandon all hope of one day finding the perfect time management system – or perfect relationship, job, neighborhood, etcetera – and relax back into the inescapable chaos and muddle of the one you have.

And then – once you’re facing your real situation, not fixating on a fantasy alternative – you suddenly find yourself able to start making a few concrete improvements, here and now, unburdened by any need for those improvements to usher in a golden age of perfection. This, in my experience, is the only way personal change ever really happens: by first seeing that it’s always a matter of rebuilding the ship mid-ocean, making adjustments to a life you can’t ever take back to port or trade for another.

The American Zen teacher John Tarrant says, “freedom, waking up and fearlessness come down to the simplicity of ‘Wait a minute, what if this is it?'” When I hear such exhortations to live in the moment, the fresh-start addict in me is quite capable of turning them into perfectionistic plans, too: “From tomorrow morning, I’ll meditate every single day, and become the kind of person who lives in the moment!” But Tarrant’s point isn’t that you should live in the moment tomorrow. It’s that this is it, right now, with all its odious imperfections – the tasks that remain unaddressed, the messes that haven’t been cleared up, the enormous personality flaws that still haven’t been corrected. And it’s the only place I can ever hope to get anything meaningful done.

Ok so…

This kind of reminds me of that last charge in Lord of the Rings where Theoden King of the Rohirrim, charges down the hill in an impossible doomed to failure battle with an incredibly huge and vicious army or orcs, monsters, and bad guys of all shapes and sizes. And of course, my life isn’t any where near that dramatic or epic … most days anyway…

In years past, I might have imagined myself charging down that hill to battle my demons, my obstacles, my mistakes and misdeeds, my faults, flaws, and failures… But today, I’m looking at things a little differently. I’m thinking, “What if…”

What if, here I am, with my army at my back. My very own army of all of my good qualities, along with my many mistakes, faults, flaws, regrets, remorse, guilt, shame, mishaps, misdeeds, failures, and all the other imperfect and messy parts of me that make me human… and we’re charging down that hill to tackle the next big thing… totally unprepared… not even at all sure what we could possibly be battling…

I love this new vision…

Oh and by the way

If you haven’t seen the Lord of the Rings, or read the books, here’s a quote and a video:

“The end will not be long,” said the King, “but I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap. … When dawn comes, I will bid men sound Helm’s horn, and I will ride forth. Will you ride with me then, son of Arathorn? Maybe we shall cleave a road, or make such an end as will be worth a song, if any be left to sing of us hereafter.”

So now I’m feeling empowered and ready to take on the world… or at least that tiny little part of it that I think of as mine. How about you?