Dangerous pavements…
But this year I face the ice
with my father’s stick
~ Seamus Heaney
On New Year’s Eve, two years ago, health officials confirmed an outbreak of a new virus causing pneumonia-like clusters in the central Chinese city of Wuhan. Since then – as we all now know – the virus spread to nearly every country, killing over 6.6 million people and decimating the world’s economies. Amid fireworks and countdowns on this last day of 2022, China is again battling a surge of infections nationwide, after it recently – and abruptly – rolled back the stringent zero-COVID policy it had in place for almost three years. There are widespread reports of overwhelmed hospitals and funeral homes, of crematorium furnaces working around the clock with a cremation backlog. The COVID death toll released by China’s National Health Commission fails to show the severity of the current outbreak, stating that a country of 1.4 billion people has suffered only 5,237 COVID-related deaths during the pandemic. The country’s definition of a COVID death, counts only deaths resulting from pneumonia or respiratory failure in its reports. This explains the low numbers, and if we didn’t know better, it might also explain that the ruling Communist Party is on top of things. But we know better.
After ten months, war rages on in Ukraine. This New Year’s Eve, there is no end in sight. Russia, previously targeting Ukraine’s energy sector leaving millions without electricity in a bitterly cold winter, has intensified its attacks. On this last day of the year, it has launched 20 cruise missiles. bombing residential areas and civilians in the capital Kyiv, where many Ukrainians – despite the danger – have returned to be with their loved ones to ring in the new year. Defiant and determined that Russia will not rob them of this moment of hope, some of them haven’t seen each other since the invasion started in February.
Hope.
Hope is good for us.
Hope can change our lives.
Dr. Shane Lopez, senior scientist at Gallup, defines hope as
the belief that the future will be better than the present, along with the belief that you have the power to make it so.
Hope might feel a bit naïve in tumultuous times like these – war, COVID, political scandals, impending environmental catastrophes and myriad challenges cross the globe. It might even feel delusional. As Dane Jensen explained earlier this year, “Hope is tough because it requires a delicate balance of accepting that we cannot know the future, while believing things will be better than the present. It’s essential because when hope is lost, so, too, is our will to endure and ultimately prevail.
At midnight in New York city, wishes for 2023 from people all over the world will be added to the thousands of bits of confetti that flutter down in the heart of Times Square – a magical sight to behold. It is also a reminder that wishes don’t work. Hope works. And hope is hard work. It takes practice.
Wherever you are today, you might find yourself in an essay from Local Wonders by Ted Kooser, a timely reflection on life and loss and on looking ahead – where the world is waiting for us:
Life is a long walk forward through the crowded cars of a passenger train, the bright world racing past beyond the windows, people on either side of the aisle, strangers whose stories we never learn, dear friends whose names we long remember and passing acquaintances whose names and faces we take in like a breath and soon breathe away.
There’s a windy, perilous passage between each car and the next, and we steady ourselves and push across the iron couplers clenched beneath our feet. Because we are fearful and unsteady crossing through wind and noise, we more keenly feel the train rock under our legs, feel the steel rails give just a little under the weight, as if the rails were tightly stretched wire and there were nothing but air beneath them.
So many cars, so many passages. For you, there may be the dangerous passage of puberty, the wind hot and wild in your hair, followed by marriage, during which for a while you walk lightly under an infinite blue sky, then the rushing warm air of the birth of your first child. And then so soon, it seems, a door slams shut behind you, and you find yourself out in the cold where you learn that the first of your parents has died.
But the next car is warm and bright, and you take a deep breath and unbutton your coat and wipe your glasses. People on either side, so generous with their friendship, turn up their faces to you, and you warm your hands in theirs. Some of them stand and grip your shoulders in their strong fingers, and you gladly accept their embraces, though you may not know them well. How young you feel in their arms.
And so it goes, car after car, passage to passage. As you make your way forward, the roadbed seems to grow more irregular under the wheels as you walk along. ‘Poor workmanship,’ you think, and to steady yourself, you put your hands on people’s shoulders. So much of the world, colorful as flying leaves, clatters past beyond the windows while you try to be attentive to those you move among, maybe stopping to help someone up from their seat, maybe pausing to tell a stranger about something you saw in one of the cars through which you passed. Was it just yesterday or the day before? Could it have been a week ago, a month ago, perhaps a year?
The locomotive is up ahead somewhere, and you hope to have a minute’s talk with the engineer, just a minute to ask a few questions of him. You’re pretty sure he’ll be wearing a striped cap and have his red bandana around his neck, badges of his authority, and he’ll have his elbow crooked on the sill of the open window. How impassively he will be gazing at the passing world, as if he’s seen it all before. He knows just where the tracks will take us as they narrow and narrow and narrow ahead to the point where they seem to join.
But there are still so many cars ahead, and the next and the next and the next clatter to clatter to clatter. And we close the door against the wind and find a new year, a club car brightly lit, fresh flowers in vases on the tables, green meadows beyond the windows and lots of people who together — stranger, acquaintance and friend — turn toward you and, smiling broadly, lift their glasses.”
I’m ready to step into the club car, heading for a place called hope. There’s plenty of room.
Happy New Year
Happy 2023 to you and all your care Yvonne
Every good wish to you and yours too!