Resolutions

We've put a lot of pressure on 2021, haven't we? Now that it's here, I hope the young thing is up to it. So many catastrophic things happened in 2020, there is a natural, obvious desire to assume that 2021 will be better and I sincerely hope it is. Still, the pandemic remains with us and new mutations of the virus are only getting more contagious (though, as of yet, no more deadlier, thankfully). Hope is on the horizon with a vaccine but unless you are a frontline worker or a legislator who was downplaying the need for a vaccine just months or weeks ago, chances are you haven't got it and it will take some time until enough of us are vaccinated to give normalcy a try. And yet, beams of human ordinariness are peaking through the cage we've been living in for 10 months. NBA teams are playing in their home stadiums, no longer isolated to prescribed bubbles (though there are few fans in the stadiums). Though he refuses to concede and is even taking meetings in the Oval Office where the idea of martial law is floated, the president will give way to his successor in three weeks, and we will find out in the next few days if the incoming president will have a friendly or divided legislative branch to deal with.

President-elect Biden ran in part on the promise of a return to normalcy, ironically a term popularized 100 years ago when another president, Warren G. Harding, used it as part of his campaign in 1920. Harding is often credited with creating the word as it was believed that he misspoke in trying to say the more common "normality" but "normalcy" had existed for decades before Harding used it. It shows the power of the presidency that by simply using the word, Harding crowned it the accepted term. Perhaps there's a lesson there for the man who is about to vacate the White House that that enormous influence might have been better served to achieve policy goals as opposed to enact political vengeance and personal grievances but hey, hindsight is 20/20, so they say.

The question is, is there such a thing as normalcy anymore? Will we ever go back to the way things were before? Do we want to? Oh, sure, we'll go to brunch and have house parties and go to ballgames, movies and operas but it will be different somehow. The pandemic will most likely be the most disruptive global event of our lives. After such upheaval, there has always been a blowback, a cultural evolution that wouldn't have happened without the inciting incident. It's why many of our grandparents can't abide to waste food generations after the Great Depression and it's why the roaring 1920s were so roaring. When the Spanish Flu took millions of lives, many people were so grateful to survive it that they were determined to really live, to rouge their knees, let their stockings down and all that jazz. I don't know how to Lindy Hop but I do want to capture some of that spirit. When it's safe to live our lives again, I intend on doing so fully.

That's my New Year's Resolution. It's still a work in progress, as it isn't measurable, it's not specific, it's awfully vague and with COVID still very much a formidable force in the world, it's unclear when I can even get started on it but I want to resist the pull to return to normalcy. Last year was so disruptive, let it disrupt my complacency, let me stop the natural slide of ambition that makes settling feel like prudence and new adventures feel risky. I'm a happy person and I love my life but that doesn't mean I've reached my full potential. Surviving and remaining happy last year should be evidence enough that when the restrictions come off, I owe it to myself to do scary things, sacrifice a little comfort and push harder against the things inside me that hold me back.

Towards the end of last year, I saw a number of tweets, memes, messages and so forth that said more or less the same thing; that 2020 was misery and it is an accomplishment just to survive. I can agree with that but the unwritten question there is now that you have, how are you going to justify it to those who didn't? What is the whole point of lockdowns, the risks to our businesses, the separations of teachers from students, friends and families from each other? To recreate the world as it was, pretending like the pandemic never happened? Why are frontline workers risking their lives and their sanity caring for us? There is a term in healthcare called "moral injury" where medical professionals experience trauma by having to make impossible decisions that lead to harm in some but relief to others. As beds and equipment have been in fluctuating availability, moral injury has spiked around the world. In many cases, frontline workers must hold iPhones or other devices up to dying patients so they can say goodbye to their loved ones. Knowing that, can we in good conscience just go about business as usual when a vaccine is available?

We have to be grateful. Grateful for a new year and to those who helped us survive the last one and who will be there for us in this one. We also owe it to ourselves to take the opportunity to try something audacious and to reach what we've always been afraid of. We were flung into the unknown last year and made it through. Shouldn't that give us confidence to fling ourselves next time?

"It is never too late to be what you might have been," is a quote attributed to George Eliot but she never said or wrote it and, in fact, it runs counter to some of her writing. Surely, Middlemarch's Dorothea Brooke learns that you can indeed miss your chance to be something more. The quote itself was submitted to a newspaper contest asking for readers' favorite Eliot quotes (this was a year after she died in 1880). The quotes were never verified for accuracy and a legend was born. It appears to come from a poem by Adelaide Anne Proctor, The Ghost In the Picture Room, which includes the couplet "No star is ever lost we once have seen, we always may be what we might have been." It's a lovely sentiment and even if it's true, why wait? Why risk it? The tragedy of Middlemarch is not that the people live bad lives, it's that they realize only too late that they didn't live great ones. I'm more scared of that more than any virus.

A few weeks ago I wrote about my university students and any trends I find to be troubling on campus. I reject that wokism has run rampant to the detriment of the students but one pernicious tendency is that more and more students (not a majority, mind you, but a creeping number), particularly women or minority students are convinced that their ambitions will be curbed by an unseen force—racism, sexism, or any other retrogressive movements that bedevil our society—and so they temper their expectations. It is good that they are aware of our cultural ills but not if it causes them to remove their hats before even stepping towards the ring. I tell them that they owe it to themselves to try, to pursue their dreams and force those factors to tell them no because they might be surprised when it never happens. However, I'm not sure I follow my own advice. I'm not worried about the man or the patriarchy holding me back but I invent other things to keep me from trying. This very newsletter was a product of me shutting off my inner naysayers and acting, even when it felt scary. And it is sent to people who are living inspiring lives every week. To doctors, dentists and lawyers who never let anyone tell them they couldn't be what they were. To business owners who believed in their ideas and focused maniacally on making others believe in them too. To artists and creatives who are producing music, visual art, stories and other incredible undertakings. To parents who beat the odds and created life, to dreamers who build things out of nothing, to survivors who have already lived great lives and wake up every morning wanting to do it all again, to people who are incredibly all of the above. I'm inspired by you and in 2021 I'd like to join you.

When I was 13 my father gave me a book called I Dare You by William Danforth. It was given to him when he was a similar age. It's a handsome, slim book from the '30s which would now be called self-help. It's written in an earnest, straightforward style and gives advice in the form of dares. I dare you to be strong, to work hard, to be a winner. The advice is impossibly square (sit up straight, make sure you get enough sleep) but has yet to be bested in terms of efficacy for a well-ordered life. I read it when I was given it and was inspired but I always felt I would have the things it asks for in abundance. Reading it again on New Year's Day, I realized how quickly life keeps you from daring. The young are blessed with ambition, energy and ignorance about how difficult it is to change the world. Too often, curing that ignorance leaves the ambition bruised and battered. The concept of "I wish I knew what I know now when I was younger" is only a lament because learning of life's borders usually dampens a youthful ambition to smash through them. I intended to reverse that this year. That's my New Year's resolution. It's also next year's. And every year's.