You have most likely heard the word resolve used in two ways. The first usage is something like, “we resolved our conflict.” The second would be “she resolved to never check her email after five PM again.”
The word resolve has roots in the PIE *s(w)e + *leu, “to loosen, divide, cut apart,” which takes on an expansive set of meanings in the Latin Resolvere “to loosen, unyoke, undo, explain, relax, set free, make void, dispel.”
The puzzle here is to figure out how a word can mean both an act of letting go or dissipating and also the act of solidifying one’s position. One hypothesis is that these acts are not in fact polarized, but sequential, and consequently intrinsically related. Might it be the case that to become firm in a position, “to be resolved to” requires first an undoing?
Think about a time in your life when you resolved an issue. Maybe it was a fight with a partner, or a misunderstanding with a colleague. How did the ‘unyoking’ occur? Most likely, there was some learning that took place in the process. A fissure occurred, and the bridge building over it wasn’t an erasure of the fissure, but an act of accepting its reality and changing the landscape to accommodate for it. What was let go of was the initial anger, the sense of being misunderstood, the self-righteousness that characterizes conflict. What that was replaced by was a greater understanding of self and other. In this sense, resolve is like a two way channel: it lets out one position, and brings in another.
Another interpretation might be a verbal, more literal one. If we scan the etymological definitions, we see “to loosen”, to “dispel”, and to “explain.” It’s not that much of a stretch to then interpret the ‘unyoking’ as occurring between our internal self and the external world. In other words, we hold something–whether it’s an emotion, a goal, or a thought–internally, and we ‘resolve’ it by letting it out into the world, by externalizing it. The conflict is resolved when we talk it through. We resolve to be better at self care perhaps not in literal speech, but in the synthesis of fragmented internal feelings and thoughts into a concrete goal which we then enact externally.
Is it fair, then, to think about ‘resolve’ as nothing more or less than clarity? As the same substance brought out of the dark and into the light? And if so, what does this suggest, whether implicitly or explicitly, about the primordial, chaotic, creative cauldron of self this act of synthesis depends on for its material?