Mind Moves:Christmas Day is past. The year 2006 is over. Both have entered the realm of yesteryear and so have we. The people whom we were this time last year are not necessarily how we are now at the beginning of 2007, Marie Murray.
Nor will we necessarily be "the same" as we are today this time next year, when we enter yet another New Year and leave 2007 behind. As we live we change, to paraphrase the great Newman.
This requires us to review our ideas about ourselves on an ongoing basis. We should never arrive definitively at who we are because that too may alter in our own eyes or those of other people.
The "self" is an ongoing project, one that is clearly understood in the Irish idiomatic greeting "is it yourself?".
This is a question of much greater profundity than establishing external identity. It is a question that asks: "are you the person that I think I know, that I remember, that I now expect to converse with or catch up with?"
That deep understanding of how susceptible we are to significant change over time is also echoed in the equally philosophical statement: "I'm not myself." This is a declaration we make when we are out of synch with ourselves, whether that be physically, behaviourally or mentally.
The elf of the self is busy this time of the year, the ghosts of the past transmigrate into the phantoms of the future. Christmas and New Year parse and punctuate our lives in this extraordinary way and in so doing provide us with some vision of our "selves" from Christmas times that are past.
What we do not remember is often retained in the memories of other family members or friends, in the stories they tell us about our earlier selves and in their recollections of us in previous times.
Annual family Christmas photographs record the passage of time, providing records of sameness and change over the years. They are snapshots of the lifecycle through which we progress alone as well as in tandem with those to whom we are related or with whom we choose to share our lives.
Each New Year we set about devising some alteration to the self, whether that be a psychological one, a physical one, a fitness or health conscious one or a change of emotional or social persona. New Year resolutions are essentially about reflecting upon and revising the "self" and deciding what, if anything, we wish to retain and what we wish to change, what projects we should undertake, what activities we should abandon, with whom we should spend time, whom we should avoid and how we intend "to be" in the year ahead.
The whole concept of New Year resolutions is alteration. New Year is a time when we reflect on ourselves, perhaps more than at other times of the year, with the exception of birthdays.
We have a marker of our progress. We can "see" change and can measure it by simply remembering "this time last year". We can decide what we want to accomplish in the year ahead.
For some people their self-concept may be altered dramatically in the space of a year. Parents who become grandparents for the first time find themselves reconstructing their idea of themselves to include this new role, this category about which they already had perceptions but to which previously they did not belong.
The shift from single life to marriage is a "self-altering" change, understanding oneself as part of a couple and being perceived in this new partner role.
Parenthood happens within a calendar year, so one may change from being "a couple" to being a mother and father in that time frame: an enormous reconstruction of the image of oneself. Life events can alter the self-concept radically. The overnight celebrity may find it hard to imagine life before notoriety while tragic events may make people unable to imagine how life was before the accident, the illness or injury occurred, that changed their own self-concept or family stability forever.
The ghost of Christmas past is more than a fictional concept. It is an annual visitation that multiplies as years go by. We revisit our former selves for the purpose of self-scrutiny and self-understanding, but we do so through the lens of the present and so it is our present selves who make this journey back to whom we once were.
Because of this we can never be sure if we remember the "self" that was or if it is a person that we now re-create in our remembrances.
But somehow we do manage to negotiate stability and change simultaneously each Christmas and New Year. Somehow we remember our past selves, invent our present selves and envision our future selves by amalgamating our Christmas ghosts in this imaginative Dickensian way.
Perhaps this is how we incorporate each New Year into a lifetime. Philosophers reflect upon it, anthropologists track it, sociologists examine it and psychologists analyse it but the mystery of how we remain the same as we change is as ephemeral as the year ahead.
Happy New Year to all the people you have been and will become.
Marie Murray is a clinical psychologist and author.