A letter to 2021.

As I picked up my pen this morning I had in mind a very pithy post about change and self-discovery in 2021 but somehow a memory lingered on, I remember sitting down one evening somewhere in the middle of this year mindlessly staring at the dying light of the city and making a very pessimistic diary entry that ended with“…the lights of the city are glimmering at a treacherous hope.”

This year and its abominable predecessor left us helpless at times, we were seized with impotent anger, the whole world seemed to be falling apart in obscure ways, the crumbling population was fraught with fear and all of us were shoved into suffering as grimness took over the landscape. We could faintly discern the situation for its parts before greater damage had already been done. These past two years forced us to shut up, sit and simply watch as our world that had been “progressing forward” broke down, bit by bit. These two years dismantled the layer of hope that shielded us but they taught us how to get by, they taught us how to get through something we had no control over, they gave us the grit, they gave us strength, they gave us the power to seek that beacon light of hope in the darkest of times. We became grateful human beings, we realized that we had our feet in a fairy tale while we were treading on a rope that led us down into the dark abyss.

This harrowing horror movie enlightened us about the fact that the imperfect, unfettered now is all that we have. While we all have glorified change endlessly, we often lack the means required to cope with it. Each year we set certain shapeshifting goals for ourselves but this year rather than focusing on becoming “a better version” of ourselves we must go down the tenebrous spiral staircase of the self for there is only one imperfectly perfect version of us that exists which we already are, which can evolve and expand further, the key is finding our true self. This next year is under the burden of millions of hopes, it might be savagely cruel and depraving but for one thing, we shall learn and grow. We shall navigate through the future with the experiences that we hold from the past, the past that stunned and stupefied us over and over again but we shall survive, we shall thrive.

I choose to cling to the idea of hope with the trusting fists of a child as there is only one thing that we know, that we know nothing at all, there is only one thing that is certain and that is uncertainty itself. So as we continue to wade into the uncharted waters we must realize that fear and faith both require us to center our belief in the unknown, we simply have to choose between the two. There is only one thing that I can say to 2021, a simple heartfelt, thank you.

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