Happy 2011! a homily for the new year.

You, and I, have woken up today and are living in a year with a new label: 2011.
As the saying goes, the past is gone, the future is a mystery, we are left with only the present.

But we still believe that the future will become present, and that we can shape it by our actions and decisions. Hence the long lists of New Year resolutions, mostly forgotten come January 15th.

The most common resolution probably is to lose weight. Let me challenge you to be more ambitious. Forget changing your body, change your mind.

Open your mind to ideas that you have never before entertained: look at them, grasp them with your mind’s fingers, extract them from the context by which you know them, and look at them in the cold light of your reason.

Better still: talk to the people that you thought alien to you, with whom you think that you have nothing in common. Ask yourself why (and if) there is a distance between you and them. Ask them how they see you. Tell them how you perceive them.

At the end of the conversation you may still be apart, separated by custom and convention, by habits and outlook. But your will be enriched by new insights, by perceptions of their motives that you did not know before.

The Italians coined the word “sprezzatura”. It expresses the public image that we all want to project to others, the spreading of feathers by which we want to show how big and beautiful we are, how fearsome and admirable we are. Shed your own “sprezzatura”, look behind the others’ feathers, and try to understand that the other is moved by most of what moves you, and misunderstands you because of the show that you are putting on.

The Chinese say that your friends hate you for your qualities and successes, and love you for your failings. Try to take this with you into the new Year.