Making a simple plan for the year ahead
Forget all of the usual New Year's promises (they rarely last) and try this one instead
If you're anything like me, you aren't one to rashly make New Year's resolutions, for we are among the many who have learned, after years of failure, that one seldom sticks to one's unrealistic intentions.
Weight loss, more exercise, being kinder to nitwits — every one of those is an altruistic goal that's bound to fail, for we are but human, and what follows those earnest year-end promises is nothing more than 12 long months of quiet regret and self-recrimination.
The only decent resolution I ever made, and almost stuck to, had to do with fear, and overcoming it.
Not fear as in the possibility of running into a mother bear while on a hike in the woods, because hiking is stupid and the woods are creepy, but fear that one says no to so many things one should say yes to. Travelling more. Socializing more. Being more patient and tolerant. Being more charitable.
Anyway, you get the picture. Resolutions, for the most part, are a fool's game, and thus an annual ritual to be avoided.
And then along came COVID-19. And now, just days away from a brand new year, I have a resolution and, frankly, I'm as surprised as you.
Few will argue that COVID has forced us to snap to attention, to take a good look at our life and the world around us.
The picture isn't always pretty. For too many, these past nine months have brought life-changing tragedy, for others economic disaster and heartbreaking isolation, and for perhaps the vast majority, an underlying uneasiness and fraying of nerves, a sense of endless inconvenience and niggling worry that what once was is no more.
And yet, life goes on.
We give birth, we graduate, we marry and divorce and find new love, and move to new jobs and different houses, because despite it all, there are goals to be attained and milestones to be celebrated.
And here in Canada, life is mostly good. Most of us have benevolent charities, fresh food and clean water, social security systems, enviable health care, safe streets and, on the best days, a historical old country civility of which to be proud.
We also have something no hard-pressed generation before us had to soften the blow of a crisis: technology.
Millions of us now work from home. Millions more head online daily for news, research, shopping and entertainment, bringing the world into our homes when we can no longer venture out into it.
In the time of COVID, cyberspace has become our go-to repository of nostalgia, angst and hope, a universal, unedited and sometimes odious pathway to a new social order. We can commiserate and kvetch, agree and argue, friend and unfriend, be active or passive — in fact, live our new COVID life — through a cable, or even wirelessly.
There is worry, though, that COVID and its isolationist requirement is securing our inexorable evolution as an increasingly insular society, and that in our private push-button silos we're slowly losing our bearings, literally the human touch, as a communal fellowship.
If that's our new reality, what now, as we usher 2020 out the door and face an uncertain 2021?
What resolution could possibly make things better when we don't know what's coming? How best to buckle up, mask on, for the next bumpy ride?
Well, there's this simple suggestion, offered in the spirit of optimism and blind trust, and the acceptance that things could
be far worse: No matter where you are, or who you meet, in a shop or on a playground or through a computer screen, no matter how you're feeling or how frustrated you get or how hopeless it seems, there is one resolution that might be the perfect mantra for what's ahead.
I don't know about you, but I'm going to try to be nicer.