A New Year, Happy?

"The aim of life is appreciation; there is no sense in not appreciating things; and there is no sense in having more of them if you have less appreciation of them."

—G. K. Chesterton

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Dear Kate,

I wrote about this Chesterton quote only obliquely last night, now am ready for more, to express my head-on appreciation of and for this simple yet most profound truth, that the aim of life is appreciation.

Here comes the first outrageous claim from me this new year: The future belongs to those who live in gratitude.

Ponder on my claim before you move on.  Anatomize it.  Air-fry it to lose excess fat if you find any.  Analyze every word and the place you located it.

• The future.  What future?  The person's future as an individual?  Together with someone else?  The cosmic future?
• Future as in what?  The next second, which becomes our present as it's spoken and located?
• Belongs, like being owned?  Properties we can buy up to give ourselves more options to retire to and vacation at?  Opportunities others missed but we didn't, claims we laid in the past now we are cashing in?  A future that must necessarily speak about our past, of both successes and failures to usher in a more desirable new page?
• Live, as in getting off bed to commit deeds we've determined to the night before?  Or wandering into whatever comes our way, no more and no less than what we've come to expect of life and living?
• Gratitude, and in it.  Grateful to whom?  Appreciate what?  And falling into this bubble of affection, awareness, and affirmation, bouncing around all day long?

Do you want this new year?  2021?  It doesn't need to be.  It is given us and can be taken away.  Just because we think it is now in our possession it doesn't mean it belongs to us, even less we belong to what is prepared in it for us.  What is prepared for us anyway?  Who made what promise to us that we will find ourselves belong?

We draw lines on sand, Here's a day ending, here's another one for me.  There goes a year, now another one granted and let me go right in.  We live as if something is promised to us.  Why do we think that?  Maybe there is nothing in it, the future--at all.  Maybe the lines we draw as signposts to give ourselves meaning are totally arbitrary, lies we tell ourselves to keep at bay the simple fact, a totalizing predicament: that it will all end badly; whatever the promises are they will all in due time be broken, one after one, and finally altogether.

I was again taking a random bus the other day, and this time landed myself somewhere in North Vancouver, passed by a skateboard shop, one that I wandered in years ago to hunt for a good one for my son.  That one glimpse brought me the memory of a room downstairs in my house, how it evolved over the years from being a Nerf guns battleground to an indoor soccer field, then hockey rink, and now a guitar room with an array of axes that carry a history of their own in the evolution that is my son's.  Lines were drawn on the sand to carry himself away, and I was carried along as I tried to carry him.

I wondered, now and then and frequently, whether he actually appreciated any of these belongings.  It has to be my fault, going along with the disposing and dispensing and discarding, living life like burning bomb fuse, always running for, going after an explosion rumored to be the glory of our Selves.

He's not a bad kid, don't get me wrong.  I didn't plan to be a bad father either.  I don't think any of us growing up, getting our hands on people and things just as quickly and restlessly as we try to leave them behind, ever made the decision to live thanklessly.  At times we have even come to pour forth our gratitude in exuberant manners, banging pots and pans, waking ourselves up from apathy and fatigue, flower for mother once a year, donations during Christmas to those whom we think have less to thank for, smelling the roses, counting the stars.  Everything is summoning us to pay attention to what is really going on around us, for us.  Once in a long while we let it speak.

The future does not belong to any self-declared winner.  Whoever dies with the most toys looks most pitifully shrunk in his casket.  The ones who belong have been won over by a love undying, and they are the most joyful, energetic, creative, hopeful, generous, and robust people you will ever meet bouncing around and into the future.

Happy new year.

Yours, Alex