I think we all deserve an award for 2020. We hit a rapids in the river that turned into waterfall after waterfall, and the fact that the boat is still floating and we are all (mostly) still in it is a miracle.
A typical year comes and goes with progress, some setbacks, and a lot of stories.
This one was different.
Big example: Taylor Swift’s new album.
Her whole career Taylor has put out fluffy, entertaining albums, but in 2020 she released the deepest, most soul-gazing set of lyrics yet. The documentary about it shows a philosopher-poet side to the teeny-bopper country-star-turned-pop-star.
2020 pushed us into depth. The challenges and isolation created a seeking for depth that left many even more broken than before.
Some of us have been there before, personally; we’ve weathered storms even bigger than this. For others, this is the biggest storm they’ve ever encountered.
Either way, it’s the first big storm for this generation that we all went through together. Since 9/11, we haven’t had a crisis like this, and even that one didn’t affect most of us directly like this one.
We have all been brought to the hill where the philosophers sit and debate and most of us, honestly, have no idea how to engage in the conversation.
If we’ve learned anything this year, it’s just how unprepared we are for that vital conversation.
The award goes to the one who uses 2021 to prepare for the next big push into depth, because there is absolutely another one around the corner.
One big advocate of this in literary history was William Faulkner, a Southern writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1949. His acceptance speech comes on the heels of a global tragedy: the Second World War. It is just such a call to depth. The whole thing is wonderful, but here is his key argument:
“Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear…. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”
That’s the problem. When the going is good, it’s good. When it’s bad, we either hunker down, or we look for the reason why.
2020 was the year of hunkering down. 2021 won’t be.
The next step, in the pursuit of answers, Faulkner says, is this (follow this closely): “He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed—love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.”
Whatever you did in 2020, you probably ended up doing some of it with the glands, reacting, responding, getting emotional, trying not to get emotional.
This year, it’s our time to take the opportunity to reassess and learn it again—the old deep truths of the heart and the universal truths that weave meaning into our lives.
If Taylor Swift can do it, so can we.