“….” New Year

Your social media feed will today (and for much of the first week or two of January) be like most others. It will be full of “goodbye 2020” messages and excitable exhortations about how 2021 will be a “better year”.

It is of course entirely understandable. Everybody who’s had a difficult time sees the ticking of the clock at midnight on the 31st December as a wonderful moment to start out on a bright new future, and this year we’ve all suffered together.

I too can look forward excitedly to 2021. Not because I believe it represents some magical moment in which God or the universe simply look at us poor humans and think “ they’ve had enough this year let’s make next year easier on them”. I look forward excitedly to it because I hope that if we’ve all suffered together, then maybe we can all recover together. For this to happen though, there will need to be some accountability.

On a macro scale that means we have to look at what lies behind our situation.

We could take the Black Lives Matter protests and confine them to 2020 history. Or we could continue to wrestle with the issue. We could ask ourselves if it is possible that a society designed and built by rich white men could be failing men and women of colour. And we could hold ourselves accountable, not for the sins of of our ancestors but for the future of our descendants and we, I, could make a change. Get involved.

We could ask ourselves if we can live with seeing more men, women and children dying as they flee unimaginable terror and poverty. Drowning within sight of hope for a better future. And we could commit ourselves to holding our government to account for its foreign policy and its immigration policy. (Remember those immigrants and sons of immigrants that have kept hospitals clean and food on the table this year? Remember those immigrants and daughters of immigrants who nursed your elderly relative through a period of isolation as they suffered with Covid). We could commit ourselves to fighting for the rights of those not on these shores but who feel like us, bleed like us, laugh and love like us.

We could ask ourselves if we believe we won’t see another pandemic in our lifetime if factory farming continues. If we continue to consume 60bn land animals per annum, keeping many of them in close proximity, in unsanitary condition what will happen?

Will that inspire us to make a global change? A personal one?

We could ask ourselves if we think that freakish weather events will decrease if we don’’t change our lifestyles and reduce our ecological footprint.

I could go on.

On a micro level do you want this to be your best year ever?

Want it to be better than 2020?

Want to tell the world via your social media feed how much better things will be and believe it?

You will need to ask yourself five really important questions.

• What am I unhappy with about my current situation?
• What responsibility do I bear for / how am I complicit in this situation?
• What am I going to take control of and change?
• By when will I have taken action?
• What is the first really simple, intentional thing I can do to start this change right now?

5 simple questions. Start small. Let me know what you’ve decided to do in the comments (that’s a simple answer to number 5)

Happy New Year. Let’s be intentional about it.