by Mindy Misener
Though this post will be published after the new year, I’m drafting it in the final hours of 2020. My laptop rests on a messy kitchen countertop. In front of me are leftover candy canes, mittens, sundry plates and silverware, bananas so brown they should’ve been mashed for bread three days ago, a cell phone, a cotton face mask, receipts, and the scattered constellations of crumbs from breakfast and lunch. It strikes me as chaotic and unresolved — a fitting place to end a year that has been chaotic, and still feels unresolved.
In a strange way I find myself thinking that the year is ending too fast. To be clear, I don’t want the year to last. I’m anxious for 2021, and its blessedly effective vaccines, to arrive. Still, my desire to move on is mitigated by how dark, confused, and painful the last year has been. The year 2020 brought so much suffering and loss, much of it disproportionately born by communities of color, the disadvantaged, and the workers whose status as “essential” isn’t reflected in their paychecks. If there’s some big inspiring lesson in the detritus of the year, I haven’t found it.
Which leaves me a little stuck on what to say about all of this, as the last light of the year dwindles and I’m trying to envision what it will look like to move forward. Certainly, there’s room for fear — the problems that allowed this pandemic to get such a foothold in the country haven’t been solved. Certainly, there’s room for hope — in the kind of common courage, dedication, and care for others that has brought so much relief this last year. Certainly, those grieving lost family and friends today will still be grieving them tomorrow, and next week, and in two months.
But I couldn’t draw even a rough pie chart to represent my experience of these and other emotions, ideas, and conceptions of the new year. I feel, well, chaotic and unresolved.
This must be why I’m drawn to the image of my kitchen counter.
There’s a way in which belonging to a faith tradition makes me feel obligated to quickly draw a moral, lesson, or insight from any circumstance I find myself in. The impulse isn’t bad, but it is limiting. So many lessons come only with time. So much wisdom gets baked into our psyches on a level deeper than words. So much honest, beneficial action is rooted not in snap judgment but in slow, humble consideration.
So much of how we move forward isn’t in the planning to move forward, but in the doing so — however we can, in each hour and day.
May we trust, then, in the love that will accompany us into all of our encounters and becomings during this year.
— Mindy Misener teaches creative writing at Montana State University
and serves as Pilgrim's 2021 stewardship chair