Benedykt Staples

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More than a New Years' Resolution

Posted: 18/04/2025

It may seem funny to write a New Years' post around this time of year, but I have a good reason; I'm currently in Sri Lanka, whose Sinhalese and Tamil population (along with a variety of other countries, mostly in Southeast Asia) has just celebrated its new year, marking the crossing of the full moon with the Aries constellation. And it is in this context that I have decided to reflect on the year ahead.

The year of 2025 has already seen quite a lot happening in my life. I've returned from a solo trip to North America, started living alone again, continued my studies at university, chose to challenge eating and drinking for granted for four weeks, and I'm overseas yet again visiting my parents. In less than a week's time, I will be back in New Zealand with a lot on my mind and an upside down world (in one way or another). Let's sort through it all.

Living anew

One of the first things I will be doing when I return to New Zealand is to move out of home. My family house is being rented out and although I have the option to stay for the time being, I feel like it's a good time to experience living with other people. Living at home without your parents can be liberating - certainly you gain a large degree of self reliance, which is a good thing at my age - but it is also incredibly daunting at times. There's no one to go home to, and nothing really to do there but to play the piano, clean up, make dinner and go to bed. My garage "workshop" does have a lot to attract me to it, since I'm always working on something to do with mass foam proliferation, but that hobby is (or should be, honestly...) secondary to my studies. So I end up spending a lot of time at university. Combined with the fact that it's a thirty minute bike ride each way, going home is a conscious effort.

Therefore, I think flatting will end up having a lot of benefits for me. The first immediate benefit is most likely going to be the proximity to university, which should help me a lot in commuting and decrease the amount of anxiety I might have in making classes and commitments. I'd likely be closer to some of my friends who are flatting near university, too. Second of all, I really am looking forward to returning to a lively house each evening, and having people to talk to and interact with. As much as I am an introvert, social interaction is something I have to have. I can't go back to last year during the mid-year break when I felt utterly alone with my parents overseas and without the confidence to contact my friends - having people around will seriously alleviate that, I hope. Third, it'll be something I'm bound to remember and learn from, as long as I put the effort in to making sure I get something out of it. I have given myself similar opportunities in the past to get to know new people this way and I scuppered those opportunities in the past; I won't do the same this time. Living with others is a challenge and that's the best part about it; through challenges we make experiences with each other that last, and which I can hopefully learn from as well.

Another thing I'd like to do is try and recover my piano skills. It's not as if I've forgotten how to play, because I have learnt pieces in the past half-year. However, I was recommended by a musician at her garage sale in Redcliffs just before the start of the university year to forget learning just pieces and start focusing on learning chords and progressions. And I can see her point; it's like the saying, "give a man a fish and he'll be fed for a night / teach a man to fish and he'll feed himself for the rest of his life". Sure, I can learn and master a piece over, say, a year (I'm rather slow, especially at my current pace). But if I learn to identify and reproduce chords, I can take a piece of music I want to play and simply... play it. One is much more involved and rewarding than the other - especially if the piece in question doesn't have an available piece of sheet music. And learning chords should allow me to enrich my music knowledge, such that I can try to do the same with other instruments I've tried in the past, like the guitar.

One complication for this aspiration is the fact that, if I'm to move out of home, I wouldn't have the piano at home to play on. (Though I have the vehicle for it, there's no way I'm going to move that damn thing by myself into the back of my truck.) Thankfully, my parents have been incredibly generous to me, so I have a decent electric keyboard (a Yamaha P-45) that can follow me whereever I need it. I am promising myself that I'll make enough use of it to recoup their investment; they're not particularly cheap.

Spanish is also - intermittently - on my mind. I have to say that I feel a little bit of shame about it, because I have studied it for quite a bit of my life now, and I would like to be more confident in speaking it by now. But languages are skills that you hone with conscious use, and as long as I don't make the effort to speak with other Spanish speakers, I know that I am probably wasting away my studies. For me to feel as if I can start recovering, I need to set aside daily time to revise and test myself on flashcards, have some people to talk to, and try to write some sort of diary for myself. I used to do all three, once upon a time. I think the best way to try and achieve these goals is to take one on at a time, and to ensure that each of them compliment each other as to become self-reinforcing and sustaining. It is, unfortunately, a lower priority than I'd like it to be.

Study

I don't know whether the way I study is worthwhile for me.

Work is already rather difficult for me to complete. My only saving grace is that I eventually do it, and I usually outperform my own expectations. Somehow. But I don't know whether this is lasting study; my friends have told me the way I get through university is so incoherent compared to what they do. I loathe being locked in a room for hours by myself, trying to revise something; I will immediately drift off to the first distraction that comes to mind, and then I will be more fixated than ever on that distraction. I don't think this is really any sort of attention deficit, though it's probably a lack of discipline; maybe it's also some sort of disinterest in my study, or the way that I am doing it. I have noticed that the best way I seem to study is in trying to explain my understanding to others, because I am forced to reflect upon it in the moment and also to see whether my understanding holds up to scrutiny. But so far I have given myself few opportunities to study with others this way. I hope to change this sooner rather than later.

Friendships and... relationships

Something that has really occupied my mind, possibly more than ever in my life, is how I understand the people I have connections with, and how they understand me. University has exposed me to so many people and so many feelings that I wasn't prepared for, coming out of a single-sex and exclusive high school. And that exposure has been a good thing - it had to happen at some point - and it's up to me to make something out of it.

I was recently told that I don't put that much effort into my friendships. I can certainly see why, because I think I have been a very reserved individual, more of a cynic whose interactions has been hinged on the principle that the less investment I have in someone, the less potential there is for being hurt if something goes wrong. I said as much to the person who raised his point to me; that I feel like I can be a nuisance to my friends. And now I know that attitude has been damaging, in past and in present. For one, a person should have confidence in themselves that they feel like they are making a positive impact on the people they have connections with. You must trust yourself to be yourself, allow yourself to stand out - because that's why other people seek you out. They want to know you not just because of who you are, but also who they aren't. By trying to fit in or stay unnoticed, you're only serving to remove who you are, and make yourself more like what you think they are - aiming for a moving target that might not even be the right one. So, by giving yourself the confidence to feel as if your friends value you and want to know what's new in your life, you ought to make deeper connections with those who reciprocate - after all, you want your friends to value you as much as you value them.

Something that is far more intangible to me, though, is the idea of a relationship. It was not until last year that I was ever really interested in another person this way. Some people might not call my experiences with her rather worthwhile or rewarding but I think I managed to learn more about myself than I ever did. After not really talking to this person since last year, I saw her as I was leaving a lecture and decided to catch up and thank her, though I imagine this interaction had a lot more significance for me than it did for her. But that's no matter.

The problem is that, since then, I have people who I wish I could know and yet I have held myself back because I was too afraid to let my feelings work out. This occurred as recently as last month. But I am trying to overcome this. It is difficult to know a person, truly, but if I want to know who they are, then I have to let them know who I truly am, too. I am having someone over for dinner the night after I return from Sri Lanka, someone who I - truth be told - have a lot of complicated feelings about at the moment, though I value her very much. That one dinner has been occupying my mind a bit - when you are walking for hours in the hills of the Up Country and give your mind permission to wander along with you, what you are anticipating will inevitably come to meet you - and it will be the first time I've really had anyone I know over. I guess I'll find out what it all means soon.

What can feel embarassing after all this reflection is the missed chances and realisations you have over the years, when you find out that someone has finally been more invested in you than you have been in them and that you never noticed it. I have been particularly blind in the past... some people can make their feelings very, very obvious to you and you're so busy lost in your own world, or trying not to hurt their feelings, that you don't consider what's actually going on. But in reality, you shouldn't kick yourself for the opportunities that you unconsciously miss; if you didn't notice, then you probably weren't ready for the implications anyway.

What I often reflect on is whether I am ready myself. You need a great deal of confidence to let yourself be known to someone else this way. (Some people would term this 'vulnerability'.) Are they also ready? It's not something you can find out until you actually do make the definite step to making yourself vulnerable. This is why I also have to decide to redefine my feelings of being a nuisance and a cynic, etc. You will have a lot of trouble being yourself if you don't trust yourself to do so, and if you can't be yourself, you'll have a lot of trouble having others trust you too.

What does it all mean?

I have quite a few things bouncing around in my life at the moment, some of which are short term with long term consequences, and others of which are long term but determined by my short term decisions. The ultimate takeaway is that I need to trust myself, to have confidence to be assertive. To act genuinely and honestly is the cornerstone of my life, I feel, and by acknowledging my fears and challenges and doing my best to act according to my feelings, I think I can improve myself and the lives of people I get to know.

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