A fresh take on New Year's Resolutions (thanks to the ancient Sumerians).

How focusing on inner conflict resolution can transform your New Year's Resolution ritual.

This in-depth post is the first in a monthly series based on cultural festivals. This month we look at Akitu and consider how this ancient Sumerian festival (now revived and adapted in modern Assyrian culture) can help us find a new approach and meaning to New Year’s Resolutions. Is now a good time to focus on resolving conflict between the various parts of yourself so your creativity can flourish?

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One of the great delights in life for me is the food with the simplest of ingredients - bread. At New Year bread often steps up a gear. The Greeks have a brioche-like New Year Bread called Vasiloptia, made with almonds and Mahlépi (an aromatic spice derived from the seed of the St Lucie cherry). Tradition is it also has a tooth-challenging coin baked into it. The Germans have a well-engineered twisted bread called a Neujahrsbrezel. At Jewish New Year, the weekly challah gets a makeover with a round shape and the addition of cinnamon and raisins or apple and honey.

Pretty much every year I resolve to begin to make all my bread. I vow to work through the many cookbooks I have with recipes from around the globe. Then every year I conclude that filling the freezer with sourdough from good artisan bakeries is pretty much the same thing and that if it’s my husband’s credit card that is attached to the online supermarket delivery account then the emergency order of machine-made loaves can’t be blamed on me.

This link between bread and New Year's resolutions goes back a long way. They were both gifts from the Sumerians in the third millennium BC. Their New Year ceremony the Akitu was an energetic eleven-day affair with much dramatisation, puppet making, the retelling of creation stories, a grand enactment of mock chaos (the poor puppets only lasted a few days before they were burned) and the ceremonial humiliation of the King with a hard slap to the face. The ceremonies, which involved temples and effigies of Gods, contained promises of good behaviour for the year to come

It wasn’t a winter festival though, being linked to the planting of the barley in April. (Barley was important to Sumerians - they also invented beer). New Year, as we know it in Western society, was only formed when Julius Caesar tinkered with the calendar in 46AD and invented January - the month named after the two-faced God who could look both back and forward in time.

In both cultures, however, the promises to reform behaviour were made at a time when the societal belief was that humans were at the mercy of powerful capricious Gods who needed to be appeased. The promises were not for personal improvement but for communal survival - a bargaining with the celestial powers who controlled the harvests. They were in effect an attempt to wrest some control over nature. As society changed to become much more secular and person-centred, New Year Resolutions have become about us declaring the control we believe we have over our futures.

Ironically, of course, the reason most New Year’s Resolutions fail is lack of willpower, which is only another way of saying we cannot control our own inclinations never mind nature.

The questions

Is there then a new and better - a more creative - way to do New Year’s Resolutions?

If we no longer feel we need to beg the gods to deliver the means to make French baguettes, and research tells us that the majority of us will not keep our resolutions beyond six months anyway, is there any point in making them? Is there anything we can learn from the ancient Sumerians?

Mark Twain’s Answer

Some would say New Year’s Resolutions are nought but an amusing, if harmless, repetitive waste of time. The nearest to Substack in the 1800s was the local newspapers and in 1863, Mark Twain took to the Virginia, Nevada version, the Territorial Enterprise to express his view on the topic of New Year’s Resolutions:

“Now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions. Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual. Yesterday, everybody smoked his last cigar, took his last drink, and swore his last oath. To-day, we are a pious and exemplary community. Thirty days from now, we shall have cast our reformation to the winds and gone to cutting our ancient short comings considerably shorter than ever. We shall also reflect pleasantly upon how we did the same old thing last year about this time. However, go in, community. New Year’s is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls, and humbug resolutions, and we wish you to enjoy it with a looseness suited to the greatness of the occasion.”

Funny, but also frustrating if we genuinely do long for a lasting personal change.

The psychologists’ answer

One theory about why we persist with making resolutions is that as humans we are irredeemably attracted to new starts and fresh beginnings. That’s not because we are hopeless f-ups and it’s the only way to come to terms with our own inadequacies and give ourselves hope. Rather it is because we are storytelling creatures. We respond well to narratives of our lives that fit neatly into chapters with endings and beginnings breaking up the expanse of our existence. This is one reason why narrative therapy and narrative coaching can work well, aiding people to start to tell a new story, to allow life to follow a new plot curve. Resolutions are mini versions of that process. They are less plans for action and more one-line stories about our hoped-for futures.

The internet is chock full of advice about how to take those self-told tales and make them into measurable, specific actionable plans written in positive terms. You can find that yourself. Though if you do, please do not miss humourist Colin Nissan’s take on it in the New Yorker:

“The more specific you are about your resolution, the better your chance of sticking with it. Don’t just say, “I want to lose weight.” Say, “When my arm jiggles, I want it to look less like a pelican’s throat-pouch choking down a bass.”

Some of that advice might be helpful if there is a new habit you want to pursue but rather than regurgitating it, I want to invite us to take an entirely new view of what a New Year’s Resolution might be.

Let’s start with the dictionary

You are readers and many of you are also writers - so let’s start by looking at the word ‘resolution’ itself. Yes, it means ‘ a promise to yourself not to do something’ and the exercise of ‘determination or willpower’. It can, however, also mean the act of solving a conflict. The scientific meanings include reducing or separating something into its constituent parts. It also functions as a noun meaning ‘the smallest distance measurable by a telescope or other measuring instrument’. In electronics, the word resolution refers to the ability of a screen to show things clearly and with a lot of detail. The definition also includes the ‘conversion of something abstract into another form’.

So often we think of New Year’s Resolutions as something to pursue with grit and force. The time of year is taken as an added impetus to inspire us to tackle something hard or necessary but not that palatable or else we’d be doing it already. At the very least we tend to pick actions that require some girding up for, some determination. Often, they come with a shadow of previous failure or a self-knowledge that we have been neglecting something important. Usually, it’s the establishment of a new habit or practice, something we have a track record of failure with and wish to hammer down in our lives.

What if we took a slightly different approach, one that focused less on doing new things (or giving up doing harmful things) and more on looking closely, with great clarity at the character of who we might become? What if the resolution we focused on was not based on willpower but on identifying in precise detail the conflict that lies at our centre, and then solving it? What if we didn’t leap so quickly to easily identifiable actions but looked at how we might convert abstract desires into concrete experiences?

Resolution as solving internal conflicts

Branches of psychology such as psychosynthesis and Internal Family Systems work with the general concept that inside our being are many parts which co-exist and interact. You may think of it as being like a Russian doll with many different layers to you, each with a face that speaks in a different voice. You may for example have an adult voice that can discuss your financial spreadsheets with a wealth advisor and a small inner child who still lives as if she remained in poverty. Or maybe your inner child has a delight in play and exploration and your inner adult has a stentorious and limiting work ethic.

Even our adult parts can conflict with each other, especially if we are at a stage where we are striving to redefine ourselves in a new role. One part of you may