Happy New Year! Despite Everything
Wishing you bright spirits in dark times
If I’ve ever entered a new year with such a profound yet ambient sense of unease before, I don’t remember it. Thankfully, everything is OK in my own little world at the moment (knocking on wood this will continue, at least for a good while). Regardless, I feel so deeply unnerved both by what’s objectively going on in the world right now and how I’m subjectively perceiving it that everything feels more than a little tinged by apprehension and dread.
The one parallel that comes to mind, which will only resonate with others of a certain age, is how I remember feeling back when the movie “The Day After” aired in 1983. I was in college at the time. I vividly remember the pervasive sense of fear and dread in the air. At the time, it really seemed like a devastating, earth-destroying nuclear war could happen — and soon.
Again, this was back when made-for-TV movies (which “The Day After” was) aired at only one time, on one station. So, along with virtually everyone I knew, I carefully noted when it would be on and made sure to be in front of the TV when the time came — along with another 100 million people, 62% of the TV-viewing audience at the time.
Seeing “The Day After” was not a happy experience. Nor was it intended to be: Host station ABC had set up a 1-800 crisis hotline to deal with the anticipated wave of traumatized viewers. Reportedly, even then-President Ronald Reagan was depressed about it for days — which, we now know, was a really good thing, as it’s thought to have spurred him to pursue stronger arms control treaties with the USSR.
This holiday season, I watched “Don’t Look Up,” the recently released Netflix movie. It’s explicitly intended to have a similarly galvanizing effect on us and our political leaders; this time, however, about climate change. Although I’d be more than happy to be wrong about this, I don’t think that’s going to happen.
For one, the film’s “wake up and take action on climate change now!” message feels very much overshadowed by our recently reaccelerated focus on Covid. It’s hard to think into something as huge as the Earth’s climate when we’re once again being forced to recalibrate our plans for work, school, travel, socializing, and life in general — not to mention contending with intense divisions over the legitimacy of vaccine mandates, public health messaging, and so on.
Plus, despite its good intentions, I personally found “Don’t Look Up” both dramatically unengaging and politically shallow. Rather than the electrifying wake-up call it was intended to be, I experienced it as yet one more depressing reminder of just how pathetically inadequate the response of our cultural elites to the multiple crises pressing down on us continues to be.
So . . . Happy New Year, right? Covid is raging; climate change threatens everything. And, oh yeah: The murder rate had a record increase, almost twice as many 18-45-year-olds died from a fentanyl overdose than Covid, the Biden Administration is floundering, Trump continues to rule the Republican Party, liberal democracy is eroding worldwide, and America’s Red-versus-Blue downward spiral is more entrenched than ever.
Well, yes. Despite everything, Happy New Year, anyways. In fact: More than ever.
Why? Because sharing the wish for a Happy New Year in the face of what are, without doubt, widely shared feelings of fear, negativity, and dread has the potential to go beyond the taken-for-granted banalities of a familiar holiday. When we no longer feel we can take the future for granted, we have the opportunity to commit to it in more challenging, yet potentially more meaningful ways. Wishing yourself and others a “Happy New Year” seems like good practice — and, for 2022, the right way to start.
Today, when there are so many reasons to be negative, we can — if we’re fortunate enough to have the inner resources to do so — make the conscious choice to be positive. Of course, there are many people who aren’t feeling up to that right now, and there’s no shame in that. Life is hard, and unfair, and sometimes we’re going to break down. But it’s always worth trying to get up again, and helping others do so when we can (while recognizing that we can’t make them or do it for them).
And so — here’s wishing a very, very Happy New Year to you and yours. Here’s hoping that we can tap into that sense of renewal, possibility, and promise that New Year’s symbolizes, and have it sustain, nurture, and guide us through the coming year.
“What was really needed was a fundamental change in our attitude toward life. We had to learn ourselves and, furthermore, we had to teach the despairing, that it did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us.”
– Viktor Frankl
“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”
— Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
Here’s to becoming more beautiful in 2022.
As usual, you write quite well, at times lyrically.
I'm finding this blog so fascinating, an articulate, very intelligent progressive who has in recent years begun to explore the world of meditation, contemplation, and perhaps is just starting to feel her way toward how that might radically change the way the world is seen.
It came to mind, perhaps some VERY simple words (honed through years of all-too-complex talking and reading) might spark some interesting reflections for this New Year.
From Father Martin Laird ("Into the Silent Land," referred to by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Alan Wallace as "the best Buddhist book on Christian contemplation ever written), to my Sufi teacher Llewelleyn Vaughan-Lee, to every Vedantic, Tantric, neo-Confucian, Zen, Kabbalistic sage/yogi/mystic I have come across (and the best Western philosophers back to the pre-Socratics) all are united in one voice as to the beginning of the contemplative life.
One sees the play of sense objects that our mind labels (inaccurately) "the world," (as if it is some "thing" existing 'out there" in dead space), there is a seeing of the play of sensations we call the "body" and the play of emotions and thoughts and memories and fears and ambitions and hopes and desires we generally take to be "Me"......
and in this quiet seeing, a vast open Silence is discovered. Contrary to the likes of Sam Harris, this is not some purely private space "inside"of the little, the puny "me," but we may dare to take it as pointing to something Real - a vastness, an openness, an inexplicable luminous Spacious Stillness which seems to encompass and pervade all of this experience we label as "the universe."
Coming back to every day life in the world, the forms we label people, politicians, good guys, bad guys, the woke, the neo-liberals, the Trumpists - everything takes on a different quality, a different character, a different hue.
This is not the quietism of contemplatives who say nothing matters. This is not the "lila" - the view of the world as a Divine Play, the dark and the light of which we should just sit back and contemplative as part of the ecstatic outpouring of this vast, luminous Consciousness which seems to have almost swallowed up all we had taken to be real.
We feel now more than ever moved to bring some measure of this radical energy and somehow find a way to transform this appearance we call the world, this suffering, laughing, exploiting, heart-breakingly beautiful and heartbreaking mass of humanity and all living creatures.
But as this dawns on us, we realize if we simply approach this process of transformation with the same mindset we brought to previous actions - which seem unfortunately all too much in alignment with what has brought about this mass of suffering - then no ultimate, fundamental, TRULY radical change will occur.
So we wait - perhaps just a few minutes, or hours, or days, or maybe even weeks - or, do we dare - months - as this new vision comes into clarity, and as the impetus to action somehow finds a new leverage point.
And one day, something extraordinary - we trust it will - will happen.