Notes From The First Few Days of 2020
— BY MARI ANDREW
1. I am washing my face before bed while a country is on fire. It feels dumb to was my face, and dumb not to. It has never been this way, and it has always been this way.
Someone has always clinked a cocktail glass in one hemisphere as someone loses a home in another while someone falls in love in the same apartment building where someone grieves. The fact that suffering, mundanity and beauty coincide is unbearable and remarkable.
2. I consider whether its foolish to want to have children at times such as these and I consider that its always been "time such as these" and I consider that its never been worse. Then, in some ways, never been better. Shouldn't my hypothetical future child have their chance to smell honeysuckle and taste berries. (These thoughts roll around my head like marbles that were tossed on a smooth surface.)
3. How is a person supposed to do ordinary things like face-wash or big things like fall in love when a quick phone scroll is both advertising discounted designer socks and informing me that 12 million acres have been burned? 12 million?!
I despair, with an exhale. Then I refuse to despair, with an inhale. ("Despair is a tool to control us.")
I scroll some more: A new baby, a new album, a flower, firefighters, a threatened world holds so much.
4. "I must choose between despair and energy - I choose the latter." - Keats.
What does it look like to state in the midst of smoke, I choose energy?
For starters, I choose to finish washing my face.
Then, I choose to look: Not away, but toward.
I choose to trust: First, in goodness. Then, in people I know.
Then, in people I'll never meet.
Always, In myself.
5. I choose to eat less meat/dairy even though yes there are zillions of other ways to help the planet but that should never stop me from doing one thing, and I care about cows and koalas and my cat and the pigeons she watches.
I choose to do the things that I may think are too insignificant to matter, because sometimes protesting is an act of grieving and small choices toward energy keep me from despair.
6. I choose to enjoy.
I choose a new record.
I choose to keep a $5 note in my pocket for someone who may need it.
I choose to text a friend "I'm sending lots of love" and I choose to buy from aboriginal-owned businesses and I choose to show up at a birthday party because grief and celebration often happen in the same night.
Mari is a writer, artist and speaker based in New York City.
@mariandrew
10 - 01 - 20