Editor's Note, 1/8

January always makes me uneasy. Perhaps it’s because the season compels me to re-orient myself temporally: I am now in 2015. The year of millennium development goals. The future in Back to the Future. Only one year shy of graduation. Perhaps I am uneasy because at this time of year we commit to the change the occasion celebrates, acknowledging that nothing is constant but rather always in a state of flux.

I have been thinking a lot about who I want to become in 2015 and how I want to enact that becoming, but I keep struggling with crafting the right resolutions. Of course, I would like to be on Facebook less, to regularly read The New York Times cover to cover and to pretend I’m the kind of person who could happily run five miles on a daily basis, but all of these ideas of a possible-me seem to fall short of a real, concrete commitment to change. They seem more about developing habits than about developing myself.

The difficult thing about change is that it doesn’t happen ceremoniously. The clock striking midnight, a diploma placed in our hand or the switching of our relationship status on Facebook doesn’t automatically change who we are. At best, these occasions force us to acknowledge that change happened, is happening and will continue to happen, but change as a process often requires more risk than ritual.

This past year was a difficult year. The murders of Eric Garner, Mike Brown, Tamir Rice and countless others galvanized international unrest and protests. Women came forward with stories of sexual violence inflicted on them by loved ones, peers and celebrities. Boko Haram kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls in Nigeria, Israeli aggression killed nearly 2,000 Palestinians and left over 200,00 more homeless and ISIS became headline news with the beheading of journalists, Christians and other detractors. It felt as if the violence and the pain that lurked right under the surface of our world began to bubble up and reveal itself this past year.

Rather than confront this pain head-on, I decorated my Facebook timeline with think pieces, critical theory and sharply worded statuses. I wielded my liberal arts education and explained away the world in my finest vocabulary, but, at a certain point, I just couldn’t explain any more. I was seeking refuge in answers, rather than in questions. I was exhausted, angered and full of grief. To attempt words felt like stabbing at air rather than at the heart of the matter.

In the face of what feels like a continual string of public tragedies, I have recently begun to feel like any attempt to provide an academic explanation of the world evades the real question, the unanswerable question: why? Why does the functioning of the world as we know it necessitate so much suffering? Certainly, detailing how power operates allows us to demystify the state of the world, but acknowledgement alone does not suffice. It is a first step, but one that all too often doesn’t lead to a second or third one. It is not change enough.

“How does newness enter the world?” Salman Rushdie’s narrator asks this question in my all-time favorite novel, The Satanic Verses, which confronts similar questions concerning injustices, institutions and identities that we face today. He questions further, wondering whether newness is just a re-fashioning of the old, like working with clay, or whether it is like setting a flame against a piece of paper, fully and wholly transformative of the material state. I have read that book four times now and I still don’t have an answer, but I imagine it’s somewhere in between. But I do know that change, especially revolutionary change, requires a lot of hurt, hurt that I often shied away from in the past because I preferred to be safe than to be changed.

This year, I am learning to lean into change in all its discomforts. I am learning how to “refuse the violence of imposing too much resolution” upon my own life and the world around me. I am learning to not comfort myself with conclusions, but to infuse my life with questions, even and especially the questions that are scary to answer. Accordingly, I have made a list not of New Year’s resolutions, but of New Year’s questions I hope will guide me towards many moments of transformation: How do I imagine another way of living and live it? How do I love meaningfully and deeply? Why can’t I be better, and why can’t the world be too?