Ed. note: Now, even more than last year, it’s easy to believe that literally every single thing on this earth is broken, awful, and/or doomed. But it’s not true. Some things (not all, but some!) are good. Here are a few of the things that gave us hope, lifted our spirits, and gave us a more realistic—that is, marginally less doomy—perspective.
Ann: I figured out how to see that the moon is lit by the sun and thank you, Becky; I look at it every day that isn’t clouded up and the moon is out. I feel closer to all that stuff up there now. And I got a new cell phone and took only 3 days to conquer it, it tried hard to stay in charge but no, I have asserted complete control. So these are good indications that not everything is terrible after all.
Christie: You know the best antidote to these dark times? Find something meaningful to do in your local community. Create the world you want to live in. I spent Thanksgiving week communing with friends and teaching people to cross-country ski, and nothing can erase the sense of joy and community we felt moving our bodies in nature together.
What I was doing, I now realize, was following advice that the late writer Lisa Boncheck Adams shared on social media in 2013.
“Find a bit of beauty in the world. Share it. If you can’t find it, create it. Some days this may be hard to do. Persevere.”
I never really knew Lisa, but for more than ten years, I’ve had her words on a little sticky note on my fridge, and they’ve never failed to give me hope. Yeah, the world can feel like it’s collapsing all around us, but there are still pockets of wonder and goodness around us. We can still build a world around that and make this place ours.
I truly believe that creativity can save us. It’s about creating the world we want to inhabit. That might be a gathering of skiers frolicking in the snow, or it could be the poems that my bestie Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer writes each day and then sends out into the world. Or it might be the local events that writer Charlie Jane Anders hosts in which she is “creating a version of reality that I want people to live inside for a while.”
A better world is possible. Let’s make it so.
Craig: I have to back Christie on that one. Do something meaningful! My version is getting a group of musicians and performers together with a sound and lights crew and putting on a winter storytelling in small venues from town to town. I do this every year around the Solstice to lift us from the dark. I doubt if many reading this are anywhere nearby for these shows, so throw your own, whatever it is. Get together. Tell stories. Lift a glass. It’s a beautiful world, let’s celebrate!
Cameron: A friend recently told me that one of her small sadnesses was that her kids’ school doesn’t do any holiday singing. She has fond memories of caroling with her family, but her kids don’t know any of the songs that she once sang.
I am not sure what happened, but somehow (osmosis? telepathy? excessive Spotify use?) my kids have picked up the lyrics to all sorts of songs – Christmas carols, jazz classics, show tunes, even the French national anthem. The other day, we drove home with all of them, plus a friend, singing “Rocking Around the Christmas Tree,” in sweet, earnest voices. Just an hour ago, my oldest son and I did a very loud (him), slightly off-key (me) duet of “One Day More,” from Les Miserables. The acoustics in the kitchen were awesome.
Helen has written about how singing ties our hearts together. These last few months, my heart has felt stuck on the inside of my ribs. On these darkest days, singing with my kids linked me to their joy, and set my own heart free.
Emily: I’ve been trying to remember what’s made me smile lately, aside from the most obvious thing: our six-month-old son and his general willingness to be pleased by everything. Like when he pulled ten feet of that translucent white exam table paper off the roll at the doctor’s office last week and started waving it around like a flag — something I’ve always secretly wanted to do. One non-baby-related thing that does come to mind is this study in the Journal of Ethology, in which researchers observed for the very first time a group of California ground squirrels turning to carnivory.
[Interruption for Will to bonk head on edge of my laptop, start wailing, be comforted by crawling up my chest and slime me from forehead to chin with his drool.]
Where was I? Oh yes, the carnivorous ground squirrels who, to the great surprise of the researchers who’ve been observing them for decades, have started hunting voles.
To be clear – I’m not saying this is good. I’m just saying it’s one bit of news I’ve encountered recently that isn’t necessarily terrible, either. I can’t tell if it’s good or bad that these supposedly cute vegetarian animals in a Bay Area park have started hunting, apparently not in response to any shortage of their usual food, but to an overabundance of voles. It’s just new, and surprising, and a little bit wondrous, and I love that undergraduate researchers participating in a “Long-term Behavioral Ecology of California Ground Squirrels Project,”were the first to observe it. I mean, seriously – good for them!
[Speaking of supposedly cute animals: Will is back on the hunt, rocking back and forth on all fours, preparing to lunge for the laptop again and… shit guys, I gotta go!]
Helen: Well, Cameron already told you what I’m going to say: singing. Singing together is good. Christmas carols, Happy Birthday, Take Me Out to the Ballgame, protest songs. You don’t have to be “good at” singing. Just sing.
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California ground squirrel portrait: AramilFeraxa, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Day moon photo by Shelter, via Unsplash.
