New Year Resolutions – A San Perspective
Reflect, pause, begin again
We’re just past Quitters Day, and apparently 88% of New Year resolutions have already been abandoned. Don’t despair, San thinking can get you back on track any day of the year.
By Dr. Chris Low
The New Year is often associated with New Year Resolutions. With this in mind, it seems a good opportunity to reflect on how the idea of Resolutions might fit in a San perspective. This tells us more about the San, directly builds on our exhibits at !Khwa ttu and tells us more about who we all are.
Three words frame my thoughts: nicely, mood and feeling. These words go directly to a San way of working with change and getting results in the world. And setting out to do things better and get results in the world is what New Year Resolutions are all about.
Nicely
The English word ‘nicely’ is a translation of many San phrases and words that have been repeatedly flagged in different texts about San for at least a century. Different phrases and words that mean ‘do it nicely’ are used in all manner of contexts. Reflecting briefly on these starts to open up the richness of the idea.
If you want to have a good time with anyone and maybe get them to help you, then you must approach them nicely and talk with them nicely. If you want to go hunting, you must move through the bush nicely and work with your hunter colleagues and the animals you are hunting ‘nicely’. If you want to mend the roof of your hut to stop water coming in, you must do it ‘nicely’.
So, in its larger context doing things nicely means, if you want to do something that works, do it with all the attention and care that you can bring to it. By doing so, you increase your chances of getting the results you want. In this sense, the idea is very close to Spiritual and New Age philosophy that recommends how people can change their destiny. For a fascinating and valuable comparison, consider, for example, some of the work of Deepak Chopra, which stresses how the results of your life can change depending on your attitude and demeanour.
Mood: this is an extension of the idea of ‘nicely’, but not one that is typically flagged in San contexts, despite it being essential to an understanding of what are good and proper ways of behaving.
Getting in the right mood to go hunting, mend your hut, or simply sitting down with friends at a fireside for a much-needed bonding evening is all about being in the right mood. If you’re not, critical relationships can go horribly wrong. Again, if you approach someone or something in the ‘right mood’, you are bringing the best you can to a situation to make it work, and making things work is not only ‘nice’ but of paramount concern to people like the San, who live closer to the margins of material poverty -without easy access to the benefits of economic prosperity and the opportunities that often go with it.
Feeling
This is another word that barely appears in writing about the San but is critical to understanding what San prioritise and recognise as important to having a good life. For many San, feelings are closely linked to the gifts that God has given you.
Feeling is also something increasingly recognised in more popular Western culture as critical to being human. Whilst this point may seem obvious, for around two hundred years, the emphasis of Western essentially scientific analysis on what distinguishes us as human, has very much been on the rational thinking brain. But recent trends are convincingly pushing against this prioritising of rationality (see, for instance, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast and Slow or Lisa Felman Barrett’s How Emotions Are Made).
Among the San, many people still change their critical plans, in the moment, if things don’t feel right – such is the respect they give to ‘listening’ to their inner voices or feelings. They may, for instance, abort a hunt if something that many might never even notice, does not seem right – like a fox, bird or praying mantis doing something odd on or across the path the hunters are taking.
In a wider context, this fits within the priority San traditionally give to messages coming from inside them. Often the source of such messages is attributed to a spirit, wind or miniature animal that lives inside them and sometimes wakes up and ‘talks’ to them.
There is much the San can teach us about understanding who we are and what it means to be human.
If any of this sounds interesting, please feel free to chat about such matters with our San guides at !Khwa ttu, or look at the publications of Dr Chris Low for further reading (https://thinkingthreads.com/index.php/publications). You are also welcome to contact me directly: chris@thinkingthreads.com.