Year-End Reflections

As 2019 winds to a close, be sure to read my reflections from the last three years.

Some Reflections on 2018:

Well, here we are. Another year past. Each of us is simultaneously the oldest we’ve ever been, and the youngest we’ll ever be again. My bones a bit more brittle, a few thousand more heartbeats beat, a few thousand more breaths breathed. As I reflect on another year gone by, I am struck by the sheer amount of moments I got to experience. Many of the moments were profound, exciting, beautiful, horrible. Most were not. Most were utterly mundane. In the past year, I spent roughly a third of it asleep. Almost 3,000 hours of unconsciousness. And there was also an endless routine of driving and shitting and showering and shaving and reluctantly dragging myself out of my warm bed to get dressed and interact with the stupid outside world. I only spent a small fraction of the past year doing anything that could be considered interesting. But, even within that small fraction of life, I was lucky enough to truly live.

I was lucky enough to share laughs, to be surrounded by loved ones. To read and write and watch movies. To meet new people, taste new foods, and learn new facts (did you know it’s impossible to hum while holding your nose??). I also had moments of dread and anger and pain, stretches of great sorrow and fear. My visits to heaven were often accompanied by treks to hell. But I survived, and went on to experience even more moments of love and ecstasy. I had good cries and sad cries. I grew just one year older, but I had many lifetimes worth of luck.

’Who will tell whether one happy moment of love,’ asked Erich Fromm, ‘or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.’ And what of us—we lucky few—who have not just one, but many many moments of love and joy? And what of all the little moments so easily forgotten? Even if I can’t recall them now, I treasure the times in the past year where I exchanged a smile with a stranger, or slowed down, breathed deep, and felt the sunlight end its 93 million mile journey to warm my skin. I treasure the times of forgettable contentedness and the unadorned moments of serenity. Those moments staring upward to take in the crystalline blues of daylight or the fiery mosaics of the setting sun. Those moments stumbling into the night for my eyes to absorb the star-dappled darkness. So many of these moments in the past year. So many precious moments lost somewhere between immensity and eternity. Lovely little moments sprinkled over life’s suffering like stars sprinkled against the night sky.

It is the stars that ignite the cosmos. Without them, it would be only darkness. But with them, beauty cascades and blossoms forth. The night is awoken by the dazzling brilliance of the stars. The night is alight and alive—just as we were for the past year, just as we are right now, and just as I hope for us to be for the year to come. Here’s to 2019: may we treasure the many little moments that give light to the surrounding dark!

Some reflections on 2017:

As we usher in the new year, I thought I’d give some thoughts on the past 365 days. Much of what I wrote at the beginning of 2016 still stands. We still have a great deal of strife and pain and struggle. America and the world at large continue to contend with the incompetence and half-baked belligerence of the man who occupies the White House. An endless stream of bad news flows in from media outlets. But, just as last year, good news, though underreported, still persists. There continue to be promising and hopeful global trends, including some of the lowest recorded rates (ever) of violent crime and people living in absolute poverty, as well as some of the highest rates of overall literacy and children receiving an education. Cancer rates are down. Honeybee populations are up. Child labor rates continue to decline. The list goes on. It’s all too easy to get weighed down by the bad news. It’s what we’re inundated with. It packs an emotional punch. And, perhaps most notably, we can’t report on all the things that don’t happen. Oftentimes good news is precisely that: something bad that didn’t happen. Which brings me to the main thing I want to reflect upon in this new year: gratitude.

It’s easy to get caught up in the vastness and indifference of the world around us. It can make us feel powerless. Hopeless. Dejected. Fatalistic. So it can be heartening to hear good news like that above. These global trends and stories that are largely independent of our daily affairs are surely a justified reason for gratitude. But it’s also important for us to find personal sources of gratitude. Though it can take effort and creativity, it’s possible to discover all sorts of surprising things to appreciate. For instance, just as we can’t receive news reports on all the things that don’t happen—because there are an infinite number of things that don’t happen—we are also predisposed to be unaware and unmindful of all the things that don’t happen to each of us as individuals. And this, my friends, can be an overflowing reservoir of gratitude, a reservoir that, with practice, can be returned to in our most harrowing moments of thirst. When we work to be grateful not just for the tangibly positive things that happen to us, but also the infinite amounts of rotten things that don’t, or haven’t, happened to us, we can begin to appreciate things like not feeling ill or being injured. Not feeling a stomach ache, or a toothache. Not having a sore throat or a stuffy nose. And we can appreciate those things in our loved ones too. How great it is that your best friend didn’t get sick today. Or that no one you know was in a car accident. Or what a thing to celebrate that you didn’t die! Or that you just made it through the day without choking on your spaghetti! How lovely that you’re in a moment of respite from mental illness. Or that you got to spend some time today to engross yourself in beloved TV reruns, or to take some time to relax and to breath, or to read a thought-provoking article, or to share a connection with a family member, or to lend a hand to a stranger in need—all of these moments brought to you by the things that did not happen to you. After all, you couldn’t do a whole lot if you were dead or incapacitated. It’s intuitive, and easy, to trivialize the significance of these things. But I think that’s just because we’ve evolved to shut this out. It wasn’t practical for us to be aware of these innumerable contingencies. But this doesn’t make them, in fact, trivial. We are often ignorant of all the exquisiteness in which we’re immersed.

What can be truly amazing about following this line of thought is that it begins to reveal the fact that everything that has ever happened to us is wrapped up in a thick, entangled thread of pure luck. It’s all luck. It’s all something that, in some really important ways, just happens. And yet here we are. This, I submit, means that every moment of bliss, along with every unfortunate event that doesn’t occur, represents the winning of some sort of cosmic lottery. Lewis Thomas wrote that ‘Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you’d think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.’ Of course, this doesn’t mean that we will actually be perpetually dazzled or grateful. Nor should we be. It’s important, and inevitable, to be drowned in pain and sorrow. That’s part of being a human animal, it’s part of the complex tapestry of a fulfilling existence. However, since we do in fact exist in an indifferent universe, pain and sorrow threaten to become the default. There is no shortage of suffering, and there’s nothing that necessarily prevents it from being the only meaningful experience in all the cosmos. But that’s not the case. We happen to be creatures that can access a breadth of experience. We are kaleidoscopic in our range of emotions and feelings. So we must work for and foster the ones we deem worthy, like contentedness and dazzlement and gratitude and compassion and connection. We are here for a brief flash. We are, as Carl Sagan wrote, snowflakes fallen on the hearthfire—but so very much happens in the brief time that it takes for that snowflake to fade. So much to be grateful for, even when it’s hard to see.

So, as we look over our shoulder at the smoldering wreckage of 2017, let us take some time to appreciate the innumerable things that could have happened—but didn’t. And let us strive to be grateful for things both large and small, seen and unseen, existent and non-existent. Cheers to 2018, a year that will most assuredly be filled with a medley of exquisite wonders and devastating sorrows!

Some reflections on 2016:

This has been a very difficult year. For many, the election of Trump is the most glaring example of how 2016 has been a complete dumpster fire, and this is particularly poignant for people who are members of marginalized groups. Add to this the ample amount of remarkable deaths and public tragedies. And for many of us, myself included, this has also been a year of great personal loss and suffering.

But since there is no shortage of posts lamenting the shittiness of 2016, I think I want to reflect on the future. It’s important to note that nothing is going to ultimately change when we wake up on January 1st, 2017. There is nothing about this date that magically makes anything better. It is not as if we are turning the world off and turning it back on. Tomorrow is just like today. There is nothing but convention that marks the difference between 2016 and 2017. Which is why it’s so important to harness both our optimism and our realism for next year. Nothing, absolutely nothing, is going to change for the better unless people—people like me and you—make it change. It is up to us, each one of us, to change ourselves and to change the world. This will not happen by itself. As painful as this last year has been, the fact remains that, on the whole, we live in a much better world today than we did even a few decades ago. On average, people are happier and the world is safer than ever before in human history. Yes, the world is still full of fucked up bullshit wrapped in blankets of agony. Much of the world straight up sucks and people are needlessly suffering because of it. But look at where we’ve come from. We’re animals risen from the muck, stuck with evolutionary vestiges, victims of our capricious psychologies, subject to spectacular short-sidedness, selfishness, violence, and destruction. But we also have a capacity for great things: friendship and tenderness, creativity and laughter, generosity and compassion. We are apes capable of both stupidity and wisdom, hatred and love. What tendencies are worth embracing? It is up to us to decide. This won’t happen if we shrug our shoulders in apathy, if we accept defeat, if we nihilistically assume there’s nothing worth fighting for. We must somehow open our eyes to the pain that surrounds us, the pain of strangers as well as ourselves and our loved ones, and at the same time fight really really hard to make things suck a little less. We can only accomplish this if we keep perspective and acknowledge the dizzying responsibility of our existence. As Carl Sagan says, ‘there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.’

So, for those of us privileged enough to do so, let us temper our anger and pain from 2016 with some hopefulness for what’s to come. Let us cultivate gratitude for the life we have in order to motivate us to work hard to create the future we want. If that’s something worth fighting for, and I don’t know of anything that’s more worthy, then our only shot is through ourselves. It is our responsibility. It is up to us.