Funny story – this New Year’s, I was alone in my room, sleeping off and on, browsing the web, reading New Year’s articles everywhere I saw a link to them, watching Guardians of the Galaxy on my laptop, and trying desperately to pretend by turns that I had no work or that I was working. New Year’s eve, more often than not, usually ends up looking like this to me. I enjoy all the stupid traditions and accompanying silliness that Christmas brings on for the secular celebrators among us, but the holiday-fatigue and the lack of a really structured way to deal with this holiday usually means that, whoever I’m with, we usually pass it the lazy way. Most of the time this means parked in front of whatever movie special is airing with my family; this time, well, I was in campus, and I had no plans to leave it to go be lazy somewhere else.
It’s been a funny sort of year, hasn’t it? Generally speaking, there isn’t much to look back on that doesn’t depress. The victories and fortunes, by comparison, seem so trivial. It feels as though we ought to go around in a state of eternal reaction to the calamities and injustices that seem to be all that the news has brought us for the past twelve months; the dissonance that comes when I realize that I’m not, is problematic in itself.
So much noise has been made about it all, you see. In the noisiest nation of all, we have protests and riots that bring entire towns to a standstill to recognize the simple fact that racism is alive and kicking in their country. A former Warsaw pact nation overthrew its Soviet-remnant government. Before the year was out, no fewer than three flights failed to reach their destination, all in terrifyingly dramatic fashion. A terrorist organization given lease of life in the Syrian conflict has managed to establish itself efficiently and pervasively as the conductor of the dance that is war and terror in the Middle East. Twice, large populations of schoolchildren died en masse: once through criminal neglect on the part of their caretakers, and once by the hand of those who valued their lives at the cost of a bullet and the fear of the world. I am now, in a stroke of fiat, a resident of a different state than the one I was born in. So much more happened; this is all that comes to mind right off the bat. We need little more to convince ourselves that we are living in the middle of history. By now the old Chinese curse is a cliché, so apt it’s tiresome: may you live in interesting times.
But for me, the year was about picking myself up, putting myself together, figuring myself out. It was about realizing that once you’ve made a decision, you have to follow through on it. It was about learning the art of making plans. The news, once endlessly fascinating to puzzle into a picture of the world on any given day, has this year become a dull background beat that only ever reaches the level of being ‘food for thought’. It’s like a long-running soap opera somebody else is watching, or a webcomic that you keep forgetting to check the updates for. The reason is that now, when I hear about dead children or dying countries, when I hear about Mars orbiters or comet landings, I can’t afford to think, I should do something about that. I have enough to do already, and no space left for feeling guilty about not participating. With the time I have, I find out what I can; then I tell myself, This is the world I live in. Then I continue on my way.
I am detached, a little myopic, about it all. But there are advantages. I don’t ever think I’ve had as definite an impression about a year as I have about 2014. It has felt disillusioned, angry, noisy. It has felt as though some collective patience has been exhausted, and there is no taboo too sacred to break anymore, no story too powerful to tear apart. It has been a year where news and editorials start looking like an Arundhati Roy book: well-sourced, cogently argued, and above all pissed off. It seems like I’m always asking myself, hasn’t the world always been this way? And then I see people ask in turn, why the hell should it continue as it always has?
We do live in interesting times. Apathetic and uninvolved as I may seem, I’m doing what I can to be part of them. I’m following along. If there is a lesson to take away from this year, it is not to turn away from the unpleasant, even if all that’s unpleasant is knowing how you’re going to react to it. I get my news in headlines, and move on with my day. I learn, and remember, that the world is unjust, and that I am unjust. And I try to figure out how much I care, as honestly as I can, about any injustice I confront; so that the day I find something I can do and want to do, inertia won’t trick me into moving on. In the meantime, I decide what is important to me, and figure out how I might achieve it. As well as I am able, I plan.
Here’s to 2015, and getting where we’re going.
mentalparticipant 