Narrowsburg

To the editor:

My thoughts on the passing of 2021

Try not to scroll for once. Try to pause and consider:

2021: Goodbye and Good Riddance?

It’s easy to blame 2021 and be quick to banish it to the ashes with our feelings of disgust, resentment, grief, disappointment and frustration. The pandemic alone and its overwhelmingly invasive effects on our lives has made people quick to trash the year and hope for a better one.

We have never been more divided, cantankerous, opinionated and furious.

So it must be the fault of that 12-month miasma, right?

Or could it be us? Have we unwittingly contributed to the very things we are so quick to revile?

“The fault Dear Brutus, lies not in the stars, but in ourselves.”

Karma is often interpreted as an individual phenomenon. But truth be told, groups, nations and even the entire world is subject to its forces.

In many ways we are reaping what we have sown. What have we done to deserve this misery you ask? The list is long.

• We have let greed and the lust for power and control wrest our inalienable rights to think, express and use our God-given consciousness to make sensible choices.
• We have idolized people in power and positions of decision making, becoming blind to seeing how their actions promote their own agendas and profit.
• We have brutalized this planet, becoming even more selfishly myopic to the consequences
• We have become fixated on our own views and become quick to revile others who disagree.
• We have veered away from the very basic tenets of our humanity, become cynical, lacking compassion or understanding.
• We flaunt our religion while we trounce on the very precepts upon which it is founded.
• Our lifestyle has become increasingly unhealthy; our consumption obscenely wasteful.
• We have lost our trust in our inherent power to ensure our good health and in doing so become increasingly reliant on other things to “fix us.” We race to take things to make us better without stopping to understand what those things are or what they can do.
• We read less. We scroll. We avoid critical thinking. We stare into our phones while we have squandered the value of real communication.
• We judge. We chastise. We abhor when we should learn to listen, to consider and to accept differences.

Until we turn the keel of the things that are steering our humanity into the seas of despair, we are destined to sail into yet another year we will be quick to be rid of.

Life is for the living and for the learning.

In many respects, 2021 was the finest teacher. It held up a mirror and we didn’t like what we saw. Don’t blame the mirror.

We change the world one life at a time. Begin. Resolve to be a bit more thoughtful, a bit more patient, a bit less apt to accept what you are being told, a bit more compassionate, a bit more loving, a bit more health- minded and a bit more giving.

If more of us do some of these things, then perhaps 2022 will be different and viewed in hindsight as a year to be cherished in our collective memory and not one to be burned in effigy.