Resolve to Be Free!

We need to move on and pursue the life set out before us as it is meant to be lived: with passion, heartache, and love. The music is being played right now, we just have to choose to hear it.

Christmas and New Year’s is a time of reflection. People linger on the events of their lives, pausing with wistful tenderness at the memories made, hopes realized, perhaps meditating with brief bittersweetness at things lived only once – like enjoying the last notes of a perfect symphony, happiness at the beauty, assuaged by regret at its end.

So we have lived through a great dichotomy in the last two years, born of fear and uncertainty raised by a tentative hope of survival. Yet we seem to be trapped by a resounding hesitancy. We can turn on the television and see packed football stadiums and crowds of concertgoers, yet just up the dial see serious-faced experts with dour warnings of society’s impending doom. What to make of this? Can we be free in a world in which half of us condemn the other simply by accepting the natural risk that comes with living life unapologetically? Can we reconcile with those who refuse the brand of moral pariah - because life stops neither for the shut-in, the solicitous-minded, nor the painstakingly careful? Everywhere we see an infection of the spirit that throws us in a continuous cycle of shaming and confrontation, blame and anger.

In the meantime, we struggle to reclaim that which hasn’t been wholly defeated by misery: a return to the life we lived before the virus, a life we took for granted, a life we imagined could never be broken except through our own misgivings. Even if we refused the oppression that an overbearing, irrational, seemingly malicious, the effects were inescapably suffocating. Masks, school shutdowns, quarantines, even knowing the person walking outside, alone, masked, and wanting to shake some sense into him was a fruitless endeavor created a blinding frustration. “Be Free!” I wanted to shout it countless times. Because if we choose to keep ourselves immured, so it will be. And the longer we are imprisoned, the harder it will be to imagine ourselves as part of the memories of “before.” We become disjointed from reality and think of it as nostalgia – an almost mythical vision of how we thought life was, as if a Norman Rockwell painting became embedded in our souls.

I mourn those who suffer irreparable damage from the loss of a loved one, the job that will never come back, and the milestones and celebrations and hugs and tears that should happen in the company of friends and family – the ones who we communicate silently with through the squeeze of a hand or wiping away of tears. But I don’t mourn those who refuse to hide in their fear. I feel sorry for them. “Be Free!” But it is a fool’s errand. They have relinquished joy to wallow in despondency.

The small, innumerable moments that add up over the course of a year shape our hopes and dreams for the future. Last year’s New Year’s Eve was rich with resolutions based on leaving a time of futility behind and breathing new life into paused lives. Many recognized the fragility of not only life but free will. That if not guarded and nurtured, can be stolen from us by people claiming to be our protectors. We vowed to never look back on another year with such utter remorse at our collective hysteria, delirious safetyism, and unchecked fear. But as summer months bore witness to national healing through the liberating relief of fresh, outdoor air and successful vaccines we stripped away the worst of the previous year from our minds as if surgically removing a painful tumor will prevent it from reappearing.

Now those who promise a light at the end of the tunnel have filled it in. They would rather see us entombed in our fear than free to falter. Now, when we have the slightest cracks in the walls to see glimpses of light, we must move forward. We know the sun exists, despite an overlord class and their panic-mongering sycophants’ claims of its extinguishment. Refuse to give up the chances at living those precious moments. Refuse to let another year pass without lingering on the things that make us human: the joys tempered by loss, the ugly regrets healed by tender grace.

A friend posted a video of himself walking through downtown Minneapolis. He walked through one of the crystal skyscrapers, familiar to me as a child when my family dressed up at Christmastime to see the sparkling window displays, themselves dressed in tinsel and garland, bursting with merriment. In the lobby was a string quartet playing the music of the season. But what struck me was the ghostliness of the scene. An expansive lobby decorated in lights and adorned with ornament-laced evergreens, all but empty. How sad that a place meant to people to congregate, to share in the joy of the Christmas season, to wish each other “Merry Christmas,” and safe travels just…wasn’t. How many people passing through the enclave should stop and linger at the sounds, taking in the moment that is so fleeting in the bustling hurry of our modern lives? Many, many should be, but won’t this year.

That is the divide and the duality. We need to move on and pursue the life set out before us as it is meant to be lived: with passion, heartache, and love. The music is being played right now, we just have to choose whether we hear it.

The writer Joan Didon passed away this week. A loss for which my words cannot do justice. But I want to pass on her words, that they may be a cause of inspiration to “Be Free!”

“I'm not telling you to make the world better, because I don't think that progress is necessarily part of the package. I'm just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave's a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that's what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.”

Merry Christmas, and live this New Year.