Man about the house

http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2013/jan/05/tim-lott-contemplates-fresh-start

Version 0 of 1.

It's the New Year. A fresh start suddenly seems possible. But is there any such thing? Most of us have fantasies about starting again from scratch – particularly in our relationships. By the time you have been in a marriage for 10 years or so, it's like a taxi cab that has been working the streets of Bangkok – characterful, but beaten, battered, with scratched paint and windows that get stuck.

The fantasy of starting again is universal. The most potent words in the advertisers' lexicon are New! and Improved! We talk of those New Year's favourites, "purification" and "detoxification" as if they could render our organs, bones and muscles newly generated.

But can relationships be renewed? Does even leaving them really give you a fresh start? No. There are no fresh starts – there are only inflections on patterns laid down long ago.

This does not mean that we cannot improve the relationship we are in. But it's a slow, incremental process, usually with a two-steps-forward-one-step-back pattern. People are complex, creatures of habit, and reluctant to change.

The closest I ever get to a fresh start, strangely enough, is when someone close to me dies. Bereavement somehow cleans the windscreen of the soul, sieves out all the dreck, if only for a short time. You see straight. But the cold, glittering glass soon mists over again.

The trouble is, just as we take ourselves with us wherever we travel, we always take ourselves with ourselves into the future. A new partner, a new resolution does not change us. We are too deeply ingrained in too many ways.

This is not only true when we are old. I believe I'm the same old slob at heart that I was when I was in my 20s. Dennis Potter always said that he spent his life waiting for a revelation that was just round the corner that never arrived. I have often had the same feeling.

I know that I am different to how I was 30 years ago – but I am, at some levels, exactly the same. And any changes I have been through have not come from resolutions or flexing of willpower, but through the hammering out of circumstance.

And this is why even having been through two marriages, I face the same complaints from my partners – and to some extent, have the same complaints against them.

Yet I am not despairing about this apparent intractability. People in relationships can amend, somewhat, long-established patterns of behaviour, so long is there is goodwill on both sides. And we tend to give the past rather too much power in our definition of the future. After all, it is not the past that purely creates the present – the present also creates the past.

A real fresh start in a relationship would, in a sense, be to give up looking for fresh starts – to stop looking over your shoulder at the past, which needs to be escaped from, and the future, at which you are anxious to arrive.

In reality, there is only now and this present moment, and it's a question of negotiating that moment – if negotiating is the right word. Perhaps live the moment is better.

This is, of course, a Buddhist point of view (not that I am a Buddhist). Buddhists also say all authentic action is unmediated and spontaneous. This is where a fresh start lies – with the realisation that the past and the future are entirely artificial, not with goals and targets and the straining of sinews and tendons of your so-called will.

This does not mean you can't change things – it just means that you can't change things by endlessly pontificating on how you're going to change things. The fresh start is inside. The only change you can really make is to realise that.

• Follow Tim on Twitter @timlottwriter