Originally published in the Herald-Zeitung January 14-15, 2023.
As the New Year begins to grow legs and venture forth into uncertainty, there is for many of us a patterned pull to engage some repair work to our lives that may repeat what we pledged to improve on from last year. It can take the form of a resolution, a renovation, or a fix-up.
The beginning of a new year has a mythic image expressed in the figure of the Roman god, Janus, after which the first month is named. He is the god of transitions, beginnings, and endings. Images that represent this two-faced god, one looking ahead, one looking back, are doorways, thresholds, passageways that lead from the past to the future. Janus is often shown holding a key that unlocks doors from one condition to another.
Perhaps the impulse we often feel is to look back at the previous year and reflect on what we achieved and what renovations are still pending; we look to the future at what we might improve as we redesign our lives to more accurately align with what we believe about ourselves, our identity, and our aspirations.
I am interested in the places that haunt us in the form of ghosts that we carry from our history into the future in a project of improvement that is essentially mythic and heart-directed. These ghosts may take the form of ideas, patterns of thought and behavior that create internal filibusters to stop our progress towards a more whole and coherent sense of who we are.
Our ghosts are show-stoppers, blocking growth and awareness; their origins are in our history with their own narratives that can be obstreperous and stubborn. I think of these ghosts as forces that steal the key from the god Janus, effectively blocking the way into the future because the door to the new year remains locked.
Perhaps our tendency to resolve something of the new year is a method we may use to deal with a faction of what has haunted us in the past. So resolutions might be understood as attempts to revise our history into a new form that is more acceptable to the image we imagine of ourselves.
On a personal level, my own haunting ghosts include:
Are you good enough to accomplish X?
What are your willing to risk in order to step out of well-worn patterns of thought and behavior—and is the risk worth it?
What changes in attitude towards yourself and others are worth sacrificing familiar habits that you have used for decades as protectors of your fragile narrative?
Friends have related their own ghosts that included the specter of remorse for not choosing a different life, one they yearned for but lacked the courage to pursue. Another asked: How much of my painful past—the ghost of intolerance--can I tolerate remembering without being completely overwhelmed and check-mated?
But perhaps there is another way to view this dilemma, one in which our ghosts are not dispelled or exiled but accepted as part of the fragile fabric of our identity. A Buddhist psychologist, Pema Chodron, suggests that far from exiling our ghosts, we develop a friendly and curious attitude towards them in a spirit of cease-fire with these haunting energies.
Far from resisting the haunts from our history, she suggests instead: “Give yourself a break. Get to know this stuff. Drop the story line; forget it.” The term “maitri” expresses an attitude of loving-kindness towards ourselves and the ghosts that haunt us. Then arises the possibility of extending this same heart knowing towards others.
Our hauntings can awaken the heart, not suffocate it or incite a heart attack over our ghosts. In this perspective, what haunts us can fill us with greater awareness of who/what I am that needs acceptance.