As January approaches the mid-month mark, P wonders if 2022 can be the year we reclaim the tradition of New Year Resolutions. With just that hint of the surreal.
I’ve had to remind myself that it really is 2022 several times this month, sometimes multiple times in the span of a day. And this when we’re still just a few weeks into it! With the year starting on a note not unlike the last, given the global Omicron surge and the lockdowns, the sameness of the sameness has officially reached next-league status. But what affirms for me that it is indeed 2022 - beyond the obvious aspects of meeting a book deadline, taking on a big leadership role when I get back to my day job, my daughter on the threshold of teenage, and of course the drifting Thwaites - is that I now know what it means to be able to wield hindsight. Use it like a tool.
Looking back, I am able to see distinct anchors, personal milestones, professional highs, learnings and accomplishments, the failures and the darkness, and recognize them as helpful markers for the pandemic years 2020 & 2021. I don’t recall another year-end/start when the idea of pausing to look at life this way crossed my mind. But this year, I already know that seven or ten years down the line, the markers that will come to define my narrative for me, in the way put forth in this brilliant essay on memory, starting with the primacy effect (the first life episode we recall), dramatic arcs (plot twist IRL) et al.
And yet, the stuff that makes every day seems achingly like a big Copy-Paste curse cast upon us. A bad joke at our expense. I mean, I like my daily rituals as much as anybody else, but I desperately, sorely miss coming back to them - and for that I have to go somewhere (what an idea!). But even this is a meta-awareness that only 2020 & 2021 could’ve taught me. No wonder surrealism’s making such a comeback then; sitting above silly deja vu and looking down on haunting misery, surreal is where the meaning’s at.
What place does the New Year as a concept occupy then in 2022? What significance does this inevitable marching ahead of time, so to speak, have when we seem to be living in nothing but a cluster of frozen moments? With due respect to Dec 31 being an artificial construct, and how our wise ancestors followed the sun and the moon to mark their movements and moments, the holidays marking the last few weeks of the year and the return in the first few that we’ve also ritualized, has come to mean something for most of us. It manifests in haircuts, planners, journals, manifestos, and of course, in the New Year resolutions.
Believer or not - whether you go all big, fat list or none at all please thank you - there is something to be said about the notion of the promise that the new year’s resolutions rest on. The intent to do better, be better that appeals to all of us somewhere, is unarguably a good one, even if predictable.
To lend it newer meaning in 2022 then, perhaps this too can stem from some skillful hindsight-wielding. Perhaps we can craft a more purposeful yet fluid timeline and ask ourselves if being better, doing better, can be detached from our clocks and planners and calendars?
I found some answers where I least expected them - a surefire way of knowing life is happening to and around you! - in the first movie I happened to watch in 2022. Meant as a fun treat at the end of a long day of a doubly isolated life (writing under lockdown), Minnal Murali turned out to be more like a sign from the universe, surreal and fantastic (minor pilot spoilers ahead). It was also a fun treat of course! In a world where The Matrix’s gone mainstream - come on, by now, we all know we’re living in the matrix, we’re ordering both red and blue pills over Amazon, and we’re all but fine with it, there’s no need for resurrections of the 90s’ underground! - Minnal Murali’s the perfect underdog homegrown superhero story. But in the way it speaks about heroism, human connection, and above all, with such lightness and humor, it suggests an introspection. That it does this while sticking with the genre template - the origin myth, characters’ journeys & arcs, the epic battle, cool action sequences - and yet going beyond it, or perhaps expanding it, is a filmmaking feat. As a writer, I admired this brilliance of craft, but it won me over completely as a viewer, because it showed me how I’ve been looking at this whole new-year-new-me project the wrong way. You don’t just wake up one day, don that costume and go flying into the sky; sometimes you simply wing it with a stolen kiddie mask at the local fair, or you’re feeling charged up one day and end up sewing it yourself. (And even then, you never do fly).
Up until 2020, the beginning of a New Year invariably seemed laden with infinite potential. There were no restrictions or limitations on plans, or at least in the drafting of plans. You could take quite a bit for granted and mapping expectations onto realities didn’t seem like a Herculean task. Covid brought along with it hard facts - that actually pretty much everything is uncertain, that you’re bound to be disappointed, but also hey, you do have ‘right-now’ - the only time that matters, everything else is either imagined or remembered. Perhaps the biggest life truth then - our relationship with time - needs recalibration, reboot, work.
Time is ticking ominously in some sense - we’ve all seen or borne illness and death in the last two years, the next decade is crucial for the planet’s survival - and it is also standing still. A year is not 364 days + a last night party, it comes bunched up in the wake of the years gone by, yours and of those interlinked with yours, and also of the glaciers melting at Antarctica. In Minnal Murali, Jaison kills time waiting for his golden ticket in the form of a passport spelling escape, while for Shibu, it’s dead man walking - time has all but stopped. Both are products of their time, and also of events that unfolded decades ago.
Upon close examination, this forces us to confront the very idea of change - at the heart of new year resolutions. Despite things feeling unchanged, everything’s also changed with the pandemic. Sure, we’ve killed ourselves trying to ‘let’s normalize’ it all. In our rush to bring all of our madness into the respectable mainstream zone we’re all aching to be comfortably inside, we’ve been brushing it all under ‘the new normal’ carpet. (As if anything about Zoom is normal, or indeed as if anything we did earlier - such as not giving a thought for our carbon footprint - was so normal?)
Change, real change, is never sudden, and while there is that momentous, literal life-altering lightning strike for Jaison and Shibu in the film, nothing really changes for either, not at once. It is life-altering only in hindsight. Until then, they need to earn it, learn a lot, grow. Jaison needs to look beyond himself and Shibu needs to start feeling again. That their arcs and life paths would then diverge so extremely, be world-saving or world-destroying, is the essence of good storytelling. In their own personal narratives though, which they’re building, they are both, in some sense, growing towards becoming Minnal Murali (Original).
And that’s where my 2022 vote is vis-à-vis good intentions and promises aka new year’s resolutions. Reworking my relationship with change, seeing it for what it really means, especially in the everyday - growth. There’s a heroism in that I find I’m drawn towards, and it’s within my grasp. I see it subtly in my relationships, especially the one I’m crafting with myself, and vividly in my daughter as she turns 12. I also see it in my garden everyday. It’s always just a little bit further away, but as I get there, I find I do better, I am better.
Inspiration along the way is always helpful, and I thoroughly recommend seeking it. Watching Minnal Murali is a good place to start, and for me, Biji ‘Bruce Lee’ was the most awesome character in this context. There’s something to be said about committing to the moment and self that’s heroic, and super too. She sets her own challenges in karate and works on them, overcoming heartbreak and living life along the way. Minus any lightning strikes. To me, she’s Minnal Murali (Work in Progress), because she gives me the strongest grit and growth vibes. (Basil & Tovino, clearly I’m here for sequels/trilogy ideas, as you can see).
But until then, I will heed what the child says to Jaison as he jumps off the tree expecting to soar into the skies. ‘Let’s stick with what we can do’.
Now that we know we’re going to be living with Covid, my big Jan plan is to check in with my growth from time to time - much like my yoga practice, which grows and changes from one month to another. And that’s it.
What’s new then are impressions of time, change, growth, this new New Year. And the fact that there’s no cut-off. Not on Dec 31 2022, not ever. Life’s too surreal for that.
Happy-ish New-ish Year,
P
Postscript from T
Bizarre times call for bizarre stories. In Adam McKay’s sci fi satire Don’t Look Up! a comet is set to strike and destroy earth within six months. Two astronomers from an American public university discover the comet and try to spread the word, so the disaster can potentially be averted. But people they talk to (reporters, political leaders, and ordinary folx like us) are too caught up in their little daily routines, playing tabloid-style social media stories, to pay the scientists any heed, at least at first.
There's a scene where the US President (played by Meryl Streep) guffaws at the suggestion of telling people that it is officially the end of times. As audience, we laugh at her for living in denial. Perhaps some of us become despondent soon after, remembering that climate denial is real and all around us. However, what stood out for me in that scene were the President’s reasons for not acting on the comet-crisis with any sense of urgency.
Her first set of reasons (what the film stresses) had to do with petty power games and political maneuvers (elections, popularity polls, and so on). Unforgivable. But the other set of reasons had to do with the sheer number of emergencies brought to her attention everyday. These include drought, nuclear weapons, and what not. Most of these are actually serious contemporary threats to the planet in and of themselves, but I feel like they are cataloged in the scene to underline how the President does not realize the magnitude of the threat to which Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) are drawing her attention.
While the figure of the President (with obscene amounts of power) is in no way heroic or presented as worthy of empathy in the film, the scene itself brought home for me the feeling that the state of emergency is the norm and not an exception, not today. And if the philosopher Walter Benjamin is to be believed, then the state of emergency has never been exceptional. If we did not know that emergency is the norm, then we could, from time to time, look the other way. Of late, we have no respite.
I love this - Perhaps we can craft a more purposeful yet fluid timeline and ask ourselves if being better, doing better, can be detached from our clocks and planners and calendars?. It is such an important question...
Loved this post. Happy-ish New-ish Year to you !