My adorable 7-month-old niece gave me a cold for Christmas. It’s hard to hold it against her, since she is also full of baby giggles and has endearingly chubby rolls at her wrists and ankles and still has the delicious downy baby head that you can nuzzle and breathe in. But at about 4:17pm this afternoon, I sneezed three times in quick succession, and my slightly tickly throat and case of intermittent sniffles became a full-fledged cold.
Certainly I wouldn’t take back any of the cuddles with this new niece who will only be a baby for such a short time, who will probably stretch into at least a toddler before we see her again, like her sister before her who somehow turned four this fall while our backs were turned.
This is kind of the thing about life, I suppose. There’s the good, and there’s the bad. There’s bad with the good. There’s good with the bad. I blame evolution for the fact that the bad sometimes seems to outweigh the good in our calculations. If you’re being chased by a saber tooth tiger only 10% of the time, it’s still likely to make a sizeable impression on how you live the other 90% of your life. But now that most of us aren’t dividing our lives into predator/prey scenarios, probably the inclination to weight the negative isn’t as imperative. And yet it’s hard to get out of the habit.
I’ve been incredibly guilty of this this year. 2016 has been collectively panned as a terrible year. The part of me that can’t help but use dark humor to cope appreciates this sampling of the Twitterverse:
There’s dark camaraderie in laughing cynically into the void.
And yet, clearly it hasn’t been all bad. My family is healthy, except for maybe this cold, which I imagine will be relatively short-lived. There was a perfect new baby on each side of our family tree this year. I was able to see multiple far-flung friends who have known me for so long we don’t admit how long, because it makes us seem far older than we feel. I watched my daughters wade in the Colorado River on sunny summer days, and kissed my husband on a catamaran at sunset beneath the Golden Gate Bridge. I discovered new friends who challenge me to think with more breadth and depth, and renewed old friendships that remind me that some things are immutable. The good.
And the bad: a man who embodies everything I abhor won the presidency of the country that I was absolutely convinced, until about 9pm on November 8, would never fall for him. But in the same moment, many more rose up, via voices and checkbooks and volunteerism and tenacious presence, to defend social progress: “His views are not mine.” I worry globally, but am confident locally. Yin and yang.
New Years is generally a positive holiday (as I suppose most holidays are). The metaphoric blank page. The glittering ball drop in Times Square, fireworks over the Sydney Opera House and Auld Lang Syne. The start of “all things that have never been.” I don’t know if I’ve ever made a successful new year’s resolution. I don’t think the point is so much keeping them as making them. Making them is a hopeful, optimistic act and we need as many of those as we can accumulate in life. And so I also embrace the clean starts of spring, of summer break, my birthday, the letting go of fall. It’s never too early or too late to begin again.
Often, we characterize the new year as a baby, taking over from the old man of the previous year, beginning January with precocious charm. This year seems more like it is starting with a cautious, somewhat jaded early-20-something who has their whole adult life ahead of them, but has been tossed around a bit already. The optimism is tempered with disquiet, like scanning the horizon for a predicted storm, unsure of its arrival and intensity.
Storms aren’t all bad. The waiting reminds me that this fall, when my aunt’s seaside town in South Carolina was hit by a hurricane, what she conveyed afterwards was not the fear of the storm, but the sense of community it created in preparation and cleanup. And my first winter in Colorado, it snowed three feet in March. What I remember most is neighbors coming together with everything from shovels to baking trays to scoop away snow, even while we were noting cars by their antennas sticking out of snow drifts. Storms come and go; often they leave communities stronger for them.
In high school and college, I kept a quote book. I look through it sometimes still, amused by the often histrionic, though sincere, bent to what appealed to me at the time. Dating is hell, clearly. Other entries are idealistic. Others classic. Jerry Maguire quotes beside Emerson beside Tolstoy, beside Jewel lyrics.
I can still remember the impact of when I read The Grapes of Wrath, the imagery, the heartbreak, the despair, the beginnings of an understanding of social justice. There are several pages in that quote book devoted to Steinbeck’s portrayal of a country in deep turmoil, but which is still, somehow, slowly progressing forward: This you may say of man – when theories change and crash, when schools, philosophies, when narrow dark alleys of thought, national, religious, economic, grow and disintegrate, man reaches, stumbles forward, painfully, mistakenly sometimes. Having stepped forward, he may slip back, but only a half step, never the full step back.
Even in the worst of times, described so rawly and powerfully by Steinbeck in his evisceration of the mechanisms of the Great Depression, inevitably, we go forward. It’s not always pretty, but still “the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice.” We just have to take the long view, and gaze steadfastly and confidently in that direction, while committing, in the short view, to being the good in the bad.
As 2017 begins, I resolve to try to remember that I’m not being chased by a saber tooth tiger. That storms build communities. That a new year isn’t so much about blank pages, but about forward progression, however slow, however messy.
Happy New Year, all. To 2017.
