My friend Ivan was Jewish. He grew up in a kosher house, went to Hebrew school, was bar mitvah’ed. Even after he converted to Christianity as an adult, that Jewish childhood was reflected in his language, his personality, his way of moving in the world.

He once told me a story about the agony of sitting through a long temple service. Jewish services, apparently like those of Christian churches, seemed to gone on forever to children forced to sit still and quiet, especially since they were conducted in a language that the youngest ones did not yet know.

Ivan explained that in an effort to predict when he would be able to move and make noise again, he carefully watched as the rabbi read from the pages of the Torah, beginning with passages at the front and moving, depending upon the time of year, more or less

slowly through the sacred words, toward the end. His anticipation rose as the readings continued and he practically squealed with joy as the rabbi closed the back cover.

“And then,” Ivan explained, “the rabbi said, ‘And because it is the third week of the seventh month, we will,’ as he turned the Torah back to the beginning, ‘start all over again!”

I laughed out loud at the idea of young Ivan’s face falling in profound disappointment and at the realization that all of us humans, Christian or Jewish or Buddhist or None, know that feeling, that failure of expectation.

In these recent weeks, the ones that have curved madly toward and then gently away from the end of one year and the beginning of the next, I thought of that story and its theme of linearity (a geometric principle that a change in one variable

effects a change in another) and its metaphysical corollary that anything can be changed with enough human effort.

Belief in that ability is the basis of every new year’s resolution that has ever been made. Try hard, be disciplined, and you can make yourself better. You can spend less and exercise more. You can expand your horizon and reduce your carbon footprint, you can lower your cholesterol and raise your net worth.

We believe it and throw our energy, our time, our money into that belief like a bass throws itself at a hooked worm. And then we stare at the scale and the bank statement like Ivan stared at the Torah, stunned that what we see is not what we imagined. In that moment, when “new year new you” is outed as the trope that it is, we have two choices.

We can feel the disappointment grasp us like a riptide and pull us into John Bunyan’s “slough of despond,” where guilt and shame and despair mirror back to us what sad examples of humanity we are, and resign ourselves to living life on the

periphery, the place where desire and beauty and our true selves are just out of reach.

Or we can feel the disappointment and, like the Charleston rabbi, start all over again. We can take a deep breath, put all our effort into lifting the heavy covers of the book, and flip back to first page and its familiar words. “In the beginning ...”

And if we take the second choice, it is imperative that we remember that New Year’s Day (in all capital letters and designated as a federal holiday) comes but once every orbit around sun, but a new year is available with every sunrise, every heartbeat, every breath.