2. ‘Create pools of peace…’

Bright ideas for dark times

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Previously on Bright Ideas for Dark Times:

1. Pay the doorman a living wage

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Midwinter always brings with it the faint whiff of doom, but rarely more so than this year. Every time I check the news, it feels as though something else has collapsed, some other degradation has been visited on the world. It’s getting harder and harder to even look. The New Year looms like a gathering storm.

We have reached the dark, exhausted stump of the year, the brink of collapse. As the days shorten, we keep on working at the same pace, or maybe even harder as we try to close December in an orderly fashion. Meanwhile, all of social life accelerates, and we succumb to those winter viruses that like to fester in the dark.

It always feels like this, and always did. The year dies and brings us to our knees. Still, we continue to hurry, sniffing and griping, worrying about the hours with our families for which we are so assiduously planning. Soon it will all stop, not because we choose it, but because we can go no further. We have made a pact to all grind to the same halt.

We don’t yet know what the New Year will bring, but it will come. In the meantime, we have to face the hiatus in which not enough seems to be happening to soothe us. We check our social feeds as if we can give them enough of our energy to make them eject something good. Sadly, that is not how this works. We need, instead, to learn to soothe ourselves.

This is the difference between agency and control. We can’t make history bend our way by force; we can’t make our closest kin behave in the way we’d like. But we can marshal our own response. Even then, we have to be kind to ourselves; being human is more like painting with a broad brush than inking in the detail.

Illustration: Complot

Here are some bright ideas for steering through the depths of midwinter.