seas between us

There's been snow on the ground for just shy of a week now, and they tell me there may be more when Monday rolls around. This city isn't equipped for it, its department of transportation doesn't know how to handle it, and the forecasts are always so marginal that it's hard to ever really get it right, and so no matter how much there is it always seems the answer is the same: the city just sort of shuts down. So we will have a white New Year, I guess.

Even in the deepest, coldest parts of winter, when just stepping outside for a few minutes feels treacherous (all that snow becomes ice after a while, especially once the temperature has gotten above freezing for a day or two), though, some part of me always hopes it just lasts forever. The stark beauty of a world covered in snow contrasted with the ugliness of slush, the exhaustion, the dry skin, a city brought to its knees by the power of nature: how can you not, in that deep part of yourself, love it? Huddling under blankets with hot tea, manufacturing our own warmth since the sun has abandoned us: is that not beautiful?

It feels right, somehow, to have a wintry New Year's celebration. It should be cold: it is a celebration of the fact that spring is coming, a promise that from this point on everything gets brighter. We've left the religious festivals behind, now, and from now for the rest of winter we're on our own, with only our promises and our friends and our loved ones to keep us company.

It's been a long year; at this point they all are. It's been bitter and lonely for a lot of us, exhausting for all of us; as our institutions fail us one by one (or make their failures more manifest than ever), it's important to remember that the point of the New Year, of hoping that this year will be better than the last, has never been about hoping that the hand of providence or chance or cruel fortune deals us a better hand, but about cultivating our garden: I promise you, there is something beautiful near you that is worth celebrating and nurturing and holding onto.

And while the seas between us seem vaster than they ever have been, and while the internet seems most days to be best at destroying and obfuscating, remember that it has on some level helped us conquer the tyranny of distance. You have the power to reach across continents and speak to someone who is important to you or who has touched you in some way, right now.

So happy 2022, friends. I hope we all do what we can to make this one amazing.