What's in a year

It’s just about that time—that vague mushy week before a new year begins and we all look back at the last 365 days and reflect on what we’ve done, what we’ve lost and gained and how we feel about another year offering itself to us. I very casually said to a friend the other day, I didn’t do anything big this year, nothing really happened. Then I stopped myself and really thought about what 2022 has meant to me. How easily we can lose things like memories that get stuck behind couch cushions—we need to dig them out and face them.

At the end of 2020 Vox asked me to write their year end feature, a story about time and Covid. I learned a lot from reporting on and writing that piece but something that’s really resonated is how if we don’t go out of our way to create markers and moments in our lives, time can just bleed into one nebulous thing and as a result our memories become that too. Admittedly I struggle with this. I never quite know how to look back at and think about what a year meant. Though, I will say this—I had three big and beautiful things happen this year. One is that we got the first images back from JWST, that week changed me, gave me an epiphany about my book and gave me such a surge of hope that I still look back at those images and am grateful for humans that made such a collective dream a reality.

Another is that I took myself to Florence for my birthday and first non working vacation in over a decade. I surrounded myself with beauty, colors, food, wine, the smell of orange blossoms, ripening chestnut trees and so much art. Being there reminded me that people are always trying to find ways to depict their experiences, to convey their feelings and to create beautiful things in order to survive this strange and painful existence. I left there feeling inspired and bathed in color.

But then when I thought that was the real marker of my year—a Florentine vacation, I was wrong. In October I left for Antarctica and those two weeks changed my life forever, in ways I am still trying to understand. Surely this has to be enough of a memory to differentiate 2022 from all other years. In fact, it feels like my life is almost split in two—me before Antarctica and me after.

When we look back at our lives it’s meant not just to help us make peace with whatever’s happened, but to inform us about how we might want to live in the future. I thought a lot about that when I was there. The ice almost asks it of you as oblivious as that world is to us—there is still this stripping down of the external distractions of our lives and you are left only hearing the truth of yourself. What do you want? What matters most to you? And what are you willing to do to get it? And the answers bubble up to your heart and nothing can stop them. There is no noise to drown them out. Instead, they surround you, seep into you, they make themselves known. That is one thing Antarctica gave me—the truth.

Maybe the most striking feeling I had which has very much stuck with me, is the realization of how short my life is. We are so briefly here. And yes we all know this. But it’s forgettable, by design I think. We work and see friends and live our lives and that large external clock ticks and we can for the most part, ignore that it’s there. I stood on the ice on the last day in the middle of a blizzard, thousands of penguins marching past me, inches from my boots, thick clumps of snow falling over me, stuck in my eyelashes, my skin burning from the cold and I felt the heat of my own life-the gift of it, the odds of it and the urgency.

It’s easy for me to say this and unfortunately no way to convey this enough for anyone else to internalize that experience. Whatever anyone feels in Antarctica is very much kept with them. It will be something I have with me always.

Which leads me to next year-2023. I’ve been thinking a lot about that and mostly about trees. In California where I’m from, we don’t experience the same passing of time that we do here in New York or other places with real seasons. Last year I watched the trees outside of my apartment lose their leaves and I remember feeling so sad when the last ones fell. They were naked, their brown bones protruding in every direction, vulnerable and empty. I knew Spring would come but it was so grey, so cold and enough time had passed with them exposed that I felt that this was just how life was now. But then something magical happened, one day in early March I was walking through Central Park and in the bramble of brown gunk and mud and branches was a sprig of green. A blade of grass was poking through the ground. I gasped with excitement as though those past four months had truly made me forget that the colors come back, that life never really leaves. Of course I know how Spring works, but it’s quite another thing to witness it. All it took was one glimpse of green to give me hope again. I got to watch the city regrow itself, to watch the trees somehow make something out of nothing and I thought—I want to be like them. I want to be able to hold on through the cold, bones and gloom and all and know that I can always count on time.

In 2023 I want to be like the trees—patient, breathing and hopeful.

I hope that whatever time has brought to you this past year, and whatever it has in store for you in the next, that it helps brings you the urgency of your own life, more colors than you’ve ever seen, art that eases the pain, and answers to the questions—What do you want? What matters most to you? And what are you willing to do to get it?

Happy New Year, everyone.