I’ve never been much of a fan of New Year’s resolutions. We imbue the New Year with all kinds of significance, but our current Jan. 1 start to the year is a mix of the Egyptian solar calendar (365 days), tweaked first by Julius Caesar to the Julian Calendar and then by Pope Gregory XIII to what is now known as the Gregorian calendar, which Britain did not fully adopt until 1752. Our current calendar is thus largely detached from nature, beginning in the middle of winter, but as we have had it for centuries now, it appears here to stay.
Still, Jan. 1 marks a new beginning, and so many folks use it as a marker to try new things, create better habits, and make life decisions. However, if it is a good idea to eat more healthy foods and exercise more, why do we wait for Jan. 1? For me, that just creates more pressure and, ironically, makes it more likely that I will fail in whatever the attempt may be. Thus, I have not made a New Year’s resolution for years; it is just another date on the calendar.
Resolutions are more of a continuous improvement for me. When I first arrived at UH-Hilo, for instance, I was determined to learn ‘olelo Hawaii. I continue to work on it in fits and starts. Living and working in Hawaii means that I absorb pieces of the language on a daily basis, which has helped me tremendously. As I use ‘olelo Hawaii more regularly, the meaning of words and phrases also deepens for me.
I was in a meeting recently where we were discussing what “aloha” means in various contexts. I am by no means an expert, but I could share what it has come to mean to me and how I try to treat other people with an open mind and heart, how I try to respect and revere our environment, and how I try to better myself so that I can do those things more consistently.
In my time here in Hilo, I have had many opportunities to practice this discipline, but as we all do, I sometimes fall short. I am grateful for my many teachers, both in language and life, who have exercised patience and grace in teaching me how to improve along the way.
We are all teachers and we are all learners. In both of these roles, we seek to improve ourselves and help one another do the same, even if we do not realize it. These lessons, both those given and received, do not wait for the New Year, but happen along our life’s journey.
When we say to our UH-Hilo students that “your journey is our focus,” we are implicitly offering to help them on their terms and not necessarily on ours. Universities and colleges are bureaucracies, built on structures and assumptions that are often hard to understand from the outside. I assume every student comes to UH-Hilo ready to learn, though they do not always know what lessons are in store for them as life and learning intermix. Sometimes one of the most important lessons students learn early on is how to navigate the bureaucracy of the campus.
We divide ourselves into various offices and units, but all the student needs is the path forward. “How do I … ?” “Who do I talk to?” My rule for my office — and for all offices on campus — is that if we are not the office a student needs to fix a particular issue, then we will be the next-to-last stop on their journey, a lesson which I learned from a dear colleague. We will greet students with aloha, help them navigate the various offices with which they need to interact, and we will focus on their journey. I resolve to do this every day.
If you do make New Year’s resolutions, consider adding something about what you will learn and what you will teach this year!
Bonnie D. Irwin is chancellor of the University of Hawaii at Hilo. Her column appears monthly in the Tribune-Herald.
