Metanoia

At its outset, 2021 was set to be a time of re-emergence. 2020 had set the initial bar low so logically whatever 365 days followed would set the tone for a Roaring Twenties upswing. It seemed a frightening period of our lives was over with a promising vaccine rollout and fresh stock of optimism. But, instead, this year has had a suspended quality. Whatever expected period of relative normalcy was as far removed from our reality as our world was greenlit for a second season of Hieronymous Bosch-style pandemonium. Cue new variants of concern, political incompetence adding more insult to injury, UFO sightings, Bennifer’s reunion, strained marriages, hybrid workplaces, the reprise of toilet-paper shortages underscored by the accelerated pace of species extinction, global deforestation, deepening social divides, the collective recovery from complex grief and a pandemic ennui repeatedly testing our patience.

For all dysfunctions and shocks, this year has been peppered with many firsts; the first transplant of both arms and shoulders for an amputee, NASA’s Perseverance is the first rover on Mars, the first meeting between a pope and a grand ayatollah (and the start of good joke), scientists announce they successfully injected human stem cells into the embryos of monkeys, creating chimera-embryos (I’ve read enough sci-fi to know what follows in this second act), SpaceX launches the first all-civilian space flight, online currencies boom and owning a Bored Ape NFT can be parallel to possessing a Picasso. So, 2021 has been an … iconic year. 

Now let’s zoom out past the global detritus which has been burned into our brains this past year.  After our moment of pandemic in-betweenness, what’s next for us in 2022? 

At times like these when my meliorism insists, we try for a better world, I want to encourage people to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To throw caution to the wind and live with risk. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To accept the challenge. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fair and private place, but none embrace these moments there. Nor do they write there, or dance the tango, or argue, or dive the great barrier reef, or make history. And that’s what there is to do in 2022. Get after it while you can, keep living forward and good luck at it.