A New Year’s Dream
First published in the print column, Strictly Haresay
As I look another new year in the eye I find, at this stage of my life, the greeting is much less a challenge, and more of a wary gauging, an acquiescence even.
It’s not goals or commands I have for this New Year, but questions. Questions like: How do we create the conditions necessary to evolve in a way that supports us all? How do we begin to see everyone as more connected than separate? How do we get people to stop squabbling long enough to ask themselves: Who do we want to be? What values do we want to embody?
No longer do I have the desire to put forth grandiose personal objectives, daring the New Year to thwart my ambitions. Instead, I find myself bowing humbly at her feet, raising my sight, not to make a demand, but in an exultation; a prayer of gratitude to be here, still. Even if things are not all right. There’s too much unnecessary suffering—still. We’re always at war, somewhere, exploiting and destroying the resources that sustain us, and divided in so many ways we’re unable to work together for any lasting solutions that would benefit us all, and not just in this country.
Yet I can still imagine what it might look like if, for once, we could collectively envision the possibility of a strengthened unity because of our diversity, and what that could accomplish if we would model that for the rest of the world.
So I sit at the foot of the throne of 2023 and ask if there isn’t something that can be done to awaken us all from our warped dreaming of this life. If we can’t wake up to truly value human rights, our children’s future, and environmental stewardship, so these values might drive our collective thought, underpin every decision, dictate each law, and cause all our differences—race, religion, partisanship—to finally fall away. For only when the petty variances are recognized for what they are, and deemed less important than our shared core values that serve us all, equally, can we awaken to the truth of the fragility and vulnerability that is our own.
