It’s already the second month of a new year and the snow is melting.
We’ve found ourselves deluded by the sweet promise of a blank page, dangled in front of our noses by an arbitrary dating system instituted in the name of Catholic Reform.
We sipped the champagne and collectively raised our middle fingers to a raging garbage fire span of 10 months, yet the clock struck midnight and we’re still here. Stuck with ourselves and our bodies and our brains, stuck with the institutions we built and supported and invested our lives in, only to live through (if we’re lucky) their demise.
I won’t pretend to extrapolate the snow metaphor better than Helena Fitzegerald, whose writing is so exceptional it makes me angry and so insightfully poetic it gives me hope.
“It is always excruciating to have to live in the future once the future arrives,” she wrote in her most recent edition of Griefbacon.
It’s funny how pre-occupied we can become with the future, forecasting trends and investing in VR and hoarding our money and stockpiling achievements as a safeguard against the illusive unknown. Yet time and time again, our expectations don’t pan out to reality and we’re left with the hard work of reconciling the difference.
It makes me wonder how we, as a humanity, as a species, decided that we have so much agency over the most fundamental law of nature that is cause and effect? Action and reaction? How did we forget that our agency is internal rather than external? How little control we have over anything other than our own little universe of particles and energy?
Anyways. Back to someone else’s metaphor.
While drawing a parallel between snow days and the lost art of enjoying something just for the sake of it, Fitzgerald writes, “It offers nothing but itself, and inconvenience, going grey and disgusting and difficult as I clutch a private, stupid, untranslatable joy to my heart, useless, and unsharable, and precious because of it.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about proving lately (not the kind always going on in the Bakeoff tent, although I do frequently wonder how the bakers spend their time while waiting for their dough to rise). As most things do, the compulsion we have to prove every and any decision we make almost certainly ties back at least in part to capitalism (that insidious, omnipresent beast). But that’s a diatribe for another time.
Must we always need proof that something was worthwhile?
Love, much like a snow day, Fitzgerald posits “becomes a vast map when it is set free from achievement.” Immediately after I read that sentence, I replaced ‘love’ with ‘ourselves’, with me, with we, with our essence. Who are we when we release the need to tie existence to the relentless pursuit of external achievement?
And perhaps more importantly, if we are so obsessed with validating our own worth, how will we ever be able to agree on the inherent, innate worthiness of all human beings on this earth?
To bring it back from the existentialism of it all: We all know the cliches about life as the journey and not the destination, but what does that mean in the always hyped up but forever slightly disappointing Soup of the Day that is daily life?
We think so much about this grand idea of our ‘legacy,’ but I think we forget that our legacy is forged in the minutia of our daily intentions and interactions, which may or may not bolder up to something publicly grand.
When you anchor all of the larger questions about purpose and providing value in a grounded, actionable framework, I think it boils down to one question: What do we want to dedicate our life to, and what are the steps we need to take to pursue that?
That’s really it.
Of course we need to make a living, of course we need to continue to exist within the bounds of our societal structures, even if we dedicate ourselves to their crumbling.
But what I think we’ve lost is values tied to action, tied to tangible little steps and decisions.
Do you value work/life balance? Show me. You say you value honesty? Tell me how you hold true to yourself when you need to speak up for your needs. Do you value life? Show me how you treat waitstaff, expectant mothers, prisoners, people who look and think differently than you.
So much anger has been provoked this year from the glaring lack of follow-through, of empty promises, of words dripping with saccharine hyperbole that turn out to be temporary, placating band-aids.
I keep thinking about what I am going to tell my children about this historic moment in time. Sure, in the ‘what will I tell them I spent this time doing?’ way but really more in the ‘what did this monumental upheaval spark inside of me?’ way. Did I bury my head further in the sand, lean deeper into the machine, and numb until I didn’t feel anything at all? Or, even worse, numb until I dulled the uncomfiness inside of me just enough to maintain my identity as another Cog in the Wheel?
I want to say I stepped up. I want to say I listened. I want to say I answered the call.
I want to say that when everything we’ve ever known began tumbling around us in ruins, I dug out my surfboard and made the executive decision to ride the waves. I want to say I dug it out from the internal vault where it’s been collecting dust since I swapped deep inner knowing for productivity as the currency for my decision making. I want to say that the earthquakes cleared out the cobwebs of my intuition and the ever-darkening days revealed a strength deep enough to not only listen to it, but to act accordingly.
It’s easy to become paralyzed by the leap, to get stuck right before the action -- the same smoke and mirrors that kept our pre-2020 selves from making changes or holding ourselves accountable to our values is the haze we collectively stepped into arguably sometime this summer, wherein society seemed to have enough of transformation and reckoning and ruthless examination and retreated back to the convenience of stagnancy.
I was listening to Athena Calderone’s podcast episode with Aurora James this morning, and I was so enlivened by the number of times both of these amazing women redirected the conversation to a simple yet extremely revealing question - “But how?” How did you find resources to stay afloat this year? What are the brass tacks steps involved in turning a Friday evening rant into a Monday morning functioning non-profit? How did you get from point A to point A.5, never mind point B?
So often we rest on the laurels of our unspoken dreams or of the grandeur of someone else’s accomplishments. Not very often do we pry open the facade and poke around.
This conversation reminded me of the importance of curiosity and the necessity of time and time again, dropping our imposter syndrome-riddled egos and asking how. Keep asking, keep pushing. But how?
We’ll never see change if we aren’t brave enough to look for it.
I’d argue that more often than not, the answers we all seem to be seeking lie not in performance, but in curiosity.
Lift up the hood, peak around the corner, poke and prod and ask questions and remember that no one knows what they are doing and we’re actually all just overgrown kids who replaced joy with translucent obligation.
I would also argue that life is what happens when you are not on Instagram. When you are not existing within the bounds of your curated self, however ‘authentic’ that online, holographic presence may be.
The glaringly apparent metaphors of this past year are enough to make me laugh or throw up, depending on how I look at it (and on when I last went outside). We are so unwilling to let go, to let things crumble, to start anew, to even look with our actual eyes at the world. We want to look with our opinions, look with the opinions of our parents, look through the lens of ‘how its always been,’ look with our brains, look with fear, look from the comfort and safety of our own couches, resting easy in the comfortable fallacy that our shouting, whether online or off, will directly translate to an actual impact on society and/or our own integrity.
Where I am there is no snow on the ground. I watched as friends and strangers in the Northeast reveled in the disruption of monotony, caught snowflakes on their tongue, huddled inside, paused long enough to gaze out the window. I wondered how long it would last — not the snow, but the permission to witness it.
xx mm