The Threshold of Refusal: Inhabiting the New Year with Selective Courage

Whoever crosses into a new year without reordering attention doesn’t truly advance in time. Such a passage resembles movement, yet functions as a quiet withdrawal from oneself. Time passes, but the subject thins out. What presents itself as renewal often conceals a subtler form of disappearance.

The new year produces the illusion of motion even when nothing essential has shifted. It operates as a cultural alibi. We speak easily of fresh starts, opportunity, and reinvention, but rarely confront the ethical demands that a beginning imposes. This evasion isn’t incidental. To begin is to expose oneself. Every first step risks consequences, limitations, and accountability.

A beginning situates us in a demanding relationship with time, promise, and attention. This relationship is neither voluntary nor stable. It is constantly unsettled by events beyond our control. What follows makes no attempt at consolation. It seeks instead to clarify what is at stake. Public life remains volatile and intrusive, shaping private existence in ways that will sound familiar to most readers. At the same time, the personal sphere is undergoing a decisive transformation by choice rather than necessity.

In March, my philosophical novel Memos from the Edge will be released. The print edition appears in English. The e-book includes a built-in function that allows readers to select their own translation without breaching copyright. What remains unchanged in 2026 is a persistent hunger for the intellectual, artistic, and beautiful life. That search continues to lead toward obscurity rather than consensus, and toward neglected thinkers whose work has escaped circulation but not relevance.

Only those who relinquish possibilities can bring something into being

A promise closes doors and narrows possibilities. In a culture intoxicated by options and permanent reversibility, this narrowing appears suspect. Yet it is precisely what renders a promise necessary. A promise doesn’t predict the future. It decides what will no longer be possible. Its weight lies not in anticipation, but in exclusion.

To promise is to accept that not everything remains available. Piero Martinetti insisted that a promise isn’t a contract with the future, but a deliberate self-limitation enacted in the present. It isn’t optimism, but the voluntary reduction of freedom in service of meaning. The new year confronts us with this paradox: only those who relinquish possibilities can bring something into being.

A promise requires more than enthusiasm. It requires seriousness. Enthusiasm dissolves easily; seriousness persists when motivation falters. For this reason, the new year isn’t an invitation to want more, but to promise with greater precision. Not what appears admirable in speech, but what remains binding when silence returns.

Without attention, choice collapses into reaction

We speak of time as though it merely happens to us, as if it were a neutral backdrop against which life unfolds. Yet time addresses us. It exerts pressure. Gaston Berger described time as an ethical force that compels choice through finitude. Each new year sharpens this pressure. What was left undone, unchosen, or unsaid becomes newly visible. Time discloses not only what occurred, but what might have been.

The new year is therefore not an emptiness to be filled, but a tension that must be endured. Those who reduce time to something to be managed overlook its moral dimension. Time doesn’t ask for efficiency. It asks for presence. It demands responsibility not only for what we do within it, but for how we inhabit it!

Jeanne Hersch located freedom not in decision itself, but in attention, which precedes every decision. Without attention, choice collapses into reaction. Attention isn’t a technique, nor a therapeutic slogan. It’s the site where moral life takes form. What receives attention acquires weight. What is neglected gradually forfeits its claim to existence.

In the new year, attention matters more than intention. Intentions are abundant and inexpensive. Attention is scarce and costly. It requires endurance. Attention forces us to remain with what appears, without rushing toward correction or resolution. This is rarely comfortable. Attention confronts us with the complexity we would rather bypass. Without that confrontation, the new year becomes repetition under a different timestamp.

Ritual binds to the body what language cannot sustain on its own

Ernst Bloch described the beginning as the moment when possibility turns toward us and asks whether we are willing to bear it. A threshold is neither origin nor conclusion. It’s a zone in which remaining is impossible. The new year functions precisely in this manner. It demands positioning. Neutrality is no longer plausible.

Those who dismiss the new year as mere symbolism misunderstand the nature of symbols. They aren’t embellishments but condensations of responsibility. The new year presses us to reconsider what is necessary, what may be deferred, and what can no longer be postponed.

Ritual binds to the body what language cannot sustain on its own. Often reduced to repetition or tradition, ritual’s deeper function is stability amid uncertainty. Ernesto de Martino understood ritual as a response to existential disintegration. It prevents meaning from dissolving when coherence is threatened. Without ritual, promises remain abstract.

In the new year, ritual isn’t a return to the past but an orientation toward the future enacted through repetition. It’s action that persists when conviction weakens. Ritual isn’t magical thinking but a mnemonic that doesn’t depend on mood. It enables fidelity when motivation fails.

Every directed life is structured by refusal. Sacrifice is commonly mistaken for loss. In reality, it’s a form of precision. Ferdinand Ebner understood sacrifice as the condition for encounter. Those who attempt to retain everything encounter nothing fully. Sacrifice isn’t heroism but the refusal to let meaning drown in excess.

The new year therefore doesn’t demand greater exertion, but selective courage. The courage not to become everything simultaneously. The courage to let possibilities die so that the real may gain space. Sacrifice isn’t punishment but the ordering of desire.

Hope as the refusal to reduce reality to facts alone

Max Picard described silence as a moral atmosphere in which truth can breathe. Silence is often confused with emptiness, when it is in fact concentration. Within silence, words recover their gravity. Without silence, meaning thins and language becomes decorative. A new year without silence is merely the continuation of the same noise. Silence exposes whether our promises are genuinely our own or merely reflections of social expectation. It is not withdrawal from the world, but a correction of superficiality.

In the new year, hope isn’t a forecast of improvement but a discipline of fidelity. Hope is frequently mistaken for optimism. Lev Shestov understood hope as the refusal to reduce reality to facts alone. Hope acknowledges what is without granting it the final word. It sustains presence when outcome and meaning remain unresolved. Hope without attention dissolves into illusion. Attention without hope hardens into paralysis. Their interdependence allows life without simplification.

Change begins in perception. Rarely does it originate in behavior alone. When perception remains unchanged, actions merely repeat themselves under new descriptions. Gustav Fechner understood transformation as a shift in inner orientation rather than an accumulation of interventions.

Fidelity is the neglected term in all of this. Not fidelity to plans or outcomes, but fidelity to conscious attention. Gabriel Marcel regarded fidelity as a creative posture, namely remaining where it becomes uncomfortable. Fidelity offers no guarantee of success. It does, however, refuse the betrayal of meaning.

Those who enter the new year with attention as a promise and fidelity as a method discover that the future isn’t a destination, but a moral stance that confronts us daily. Those who attend closely will recognize what is implied without explicit reference to events, politics, or currents. And even if they don’t, these reflections may still offer the clarity and resolve required to face 2026 with responsibility rather than distraction.

 

Dina-Perla Portnaar is the author of the upcoming title Memos from the Edge