Resolving to Care

Talk offered as a ‘Wisdom Wednesday’ at Mountain Cloud Zen Center; January 7, 2026.

It seemed fitting for this first Wisdom Wednesday of 2026 to turn to the New Year. Regardless of how you feel about the practice of ‘resolutions,’ there is something about this human-made ritual of flipping the calendar that does encourage a time of reflection on the year that’s passed, and contemplation on the year ahead.

It’d be easy to imagine that our modern-day practice of making resolutions was an invention of the self-help industry, looking to profit off our holiday hangovers.

But resolutions have ancient roots, going back thousands of years, with the practice evolving across cultures:

The Babylonians, some 4,000 years ago, seem to have the earliest known practice of resolutions. For their new year’s festival, Akitu, beginning in what would now be mid-March, they made promises to the gods to repay debts and return borrowed items—a moral “reset,” of sorts, to earn divine favor for the coming year.

It was in Ancient Rome, in 46 BCE, when Julius Caesar reformed the calendar, that January 1 became the official start of our year. January is named after Janus, the two-faced god of beginnings, endings, and transitions. Romans offered promises to Janus—oaths of good conduct for the year ahead.

In the Medieval & Early Christian Era, the overtly “resolution-like” customs perhaps faded for a while. Although Christians often used New Year’s and early January as a time for reflection, repentance, and reaffirming religious commitments.

By the 18th/19th centuries, the idea of yearly resolutions had become secular as well as religious. Newspapers from that era show the rise of resolutions as we now think of them: improving behavior, health, habits, and setting personal goals. And that trend has certainly continued today; they’re largely self-improvement focused: diet, fitness, financial, productivity.

I can’t recall the origin story, but for the past 12 years, my partner, Kayla, and I have made our own ritual and practice out of setting aside some time every year around the transition to share and discuss resolutions. Most of all, we appreciate the intentionality of the practice and the time spent together.

Because we both keep them in our daily notebooks, it’s also a time to look back at the prior year, not to check ‘success or failure’ against any particular resolution, but to see what was important; what we were thinking about; where we wanted to place our attention. Through this reflection, it’s often quite striking to see how much can change in a year … as the productivity saying goes: we tend to overestimate what can happen in a week, and underestimate what can happen in a year.

And so, through this little ritual, we reflect and we look ahead. We enjoy coming to the table with our own individual resolutions, along with some for our partnership.

In looking back on the history of resolutions, I appreciated the more ‘spiritual’ origins of the practice, not in the sense of appeasing a god to avoid their ‘naughty list,’ but for looking inward and exploring and identifying our own deeper values and priorities. As these can, and will, shift and evolve over time, it’s important to renew our intention to reveal, and then to live in alignment with, our core values.

I like this Babylonian idea of a ‘moral reset.’ Contemporary society and culture is so individualistic; so focused on “what I can get,” “how I can get better,” that taking some time in the yearly transition to come back to what truly matters is deeply important.

And so I was considering how we might further evolve the practice … and it’s focused on care: Resolving to care. Or we might think of it as ‘resolving what we care about.’

It’s actually tough to find a suitable definition of “care” to capture the ‘felt sense’ that I’m referring to here. We have: “the provision of what is necessary for the health, welfare, maintenance, and protection of something or someone;” “attention or consideration applied to doing something;” “to attach importance to something;” “to look after and provide for the needs of.” Yes, all of that is lovely, but there’s a sense in which that doesn’t feel like enough—like ‘caring’ is sort of the baseline, the bare minimum we can do—whereas I’d suggest it’s the highest ideal.

This emphasis on ‘care’ was, in part, born out of a powerful, and rather durable, experience with a large dose of psilocybin, through “magic mushrooms,” while on a small retreat mid-last year.

As with any ‘mystical encounter,’ it’s difficult, if not futile, to return and attempt to describe insights into the fundamental nature of reality using a series of sounds coming out of what is otherwise a ‘food-hole’; it’s simply inadequate. But what I can say—what was so clearly presented—was the utter profundity of caring. To really and truly care about something was so clearly, so viscerally, revealed to be, not some ‘sweet emotion’ that we can feel, but the whole point of the game.

Thinking more about this these past few days, brought me back to a mundane, but rather meaningful encounter several years back, while living in Detroit.

Our dryer had broken-down, so we had a repairman come out. I never particularly enjoyed these types of interactions, where the person was so clearly just punching the clock and eager to move on to the next appointment as quickly as possible. But this one was different: I was immediately struck by how much this guy genuinely cared about his work and being of service, which translated to true expertise; rare these days. I enjoyed our interaction and watching him exercise his knowledge. And I don’t mean that at all in any sort of patronizing way, like “how cute that he cared about a dryer;” not at all. Here I was, squeezing in this brief chat about the dryer in between non-stop Zoom meetings for a job that surely paid me many multiples of what this guy was earning, and yet, I felt a deep envy for the way he was able to show up.

I don’t know if, at that time, I could’ve pin-pointed what it was about this guy that resonated so deeply, that touched a deeper longing that I felt. But, looking back, it was his care; he cared about what he was doing with his time and attention.

And I know it clearly now, because this is the way I feel about Mountain Cloud; I care deeply about it—this place, the people, the practice, and feeling like I’m being of service in my own small way.

And this last part is important—“in my own way” … We can be made to feel these days, particularly in online culture, like if we’re not all aligned around the same causes—if we don’t all care about the same things—that we’re then in opposition. But the beauty of life is that there’s such an abundance of ways to care, and it’s for each of us to identify what is uniquely ours to care about. This genuine or essential care is the origin of skillful action.

And herein lies one of the true ‘benefits’ (if we had to identify some) of this practice, of sitting Zen: we develop deeper insight into what is ours to do; what is our Living Zen, which is, of course, the whole thing: “returning to the marketplace with gift-bestowing hands.”

Last week, on an early morning run, I listened to Stephen Batchelor—the Scottish Buddhist author and teacher—on the Ezra Klein podcast. Which, as an aside, highlights what ‘interesting’ times we’re in, where we have a Buddhist scholar interviewed on a New York Times political podcast. The whole thing is worth a listen, but one thing stuck with me in relation to this: Batchelor talked about meditative practices helping to create “the appropriate space from which to make effective judgments about how to live.”

He went on to talk about this how we live needing to be based in an “ethics of care,” an idea he picked up from feminist ethicist Carol Gilligan. Gilligan distinguishes between ‘justice’ and ‘care.’ She talks about an ethics of justice as ‘male’: there’s a system of law, of rules, and we make our ethical judgements in accordance with the law, or the rule of the religious society, and so on. So we’re more concerned with an abstract model of what is right and wrong that you then use to make real-world decisions.

On the other end of the ethical spectrum, there’s an ethics of care, which may be described as feminine. What drives an ethical response to, for example, a particular instance of human suffering is to understand, as best we can, the uniqueness of the moral dilemma. So, to try to respond to the situation in a way that is the most caring thing to do: How can I respond to this situation in a way that can minimize the suffering of this person and optimize their capacity to find a resolution to live a better life? It may not fit neatly into some categories of justice, but it’s responding to the actual deep experience of that suffering person, or situation, at that moment.

And, in case we needed an added, selfish benefit of living this ‘ethics of care’ in a way that is uniquely our own, Arthur Brooks, the Harvard professor and author’s research has firmly concluded that our own sense of happiness, or we might say, flourishing, is not nearly as much about receiving love, but more about distributing our own: it’s how we apply our love—our care and our action—that is the primary indicator of our own sense of wellbeing.

And when it comes to action, it’s easy these days to fall into a bit of nihilism, where it can all feel so far gone, or so monumental, that there’s nothing I can do. But, we mustn’t forget that norms and culture shift and evolve through the actions of a small group of people, rippling out to the broader population.

And so, it isn’t naive to suggest that us leaving the Zendo this evening, resolving to care, in our own ways, can in fact change the world.