Have a new year looking up, not down

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 31/12/2024 (445 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The rivers. The Red and Assiniboine, winding into the city from the south and the west, chewing their own routes through the soft wet soil, setting their own particular agendas, inch by inch, day by day by day.

The Assiniboine, with its oxbows and its distracted abandoned curls, is running in along the lowest land from Portage la Prairie as it always does, with abandoned and forgotten courses left aside from the main route, water-filled steadies left alone in fields and hollows. The Red, following its own ragged curlicue path north from Emerson, is meeting up with the holy trio of the Saints — St. Jean Baptiste, Ste. Agathe, Saint Adolphe — always finding the one true line. Not the one straight line, but the one true line that the absolute of gravity will always force it to follow, eventually confounding the best laid plans of human planning and engineering.

They’ll meet and head north, Lake Winnipeg bound, all of that happening the way it has to happen, no choices or decisions or intentions making much more than a hill of beans of a difference. The hills or valleys or the simple little rises will hem in the shoulders far more easily than you ever could, no matter how much you try.

Oh. And Happy New Year.

You? Little, old, righteously-independent you?

Well.

Not one single thing you can do will change that in even as much as one iota.

People are pretty much the same: we want what we want. Desire what we desire — whether we’re willing to admit it, or just carry it around inside us, bound up hidden in whispery paper-thin complexity like nested cloves in a head of garlic.

Dress it up any way you like — the truth is that we want the coin flip to land in our favour every time. If there are layoffs, let it be someone else that’s laid off. A sudden death? Better that it’s someone you can righteously and seriously grieve, instead of having your own candle blown out.

That’s just human nature.

So. That brings us to here.

New Year’s Eve. Heading steady like the river unstoppable into 2025.

And what exactly are you going to do?

The best, the absolute best you can do is to make this place a better place for someone else, even if it’s someone you don’t know and never will. The best you can do is to give something back. The best you can do is to hold your tongue when the finest of hurtful ripostes so dearly wants to spring forth and wound.

The best you can do is to look up, instead of down.

The world is bigger than you. And it always will be.

The Milky Way is up there, even if the city lights won’t let you see it.

Along Portage, along Main, the traffic lights tick metronomic.

But up in the Whiteshell, up and away from the lights, the Milky Way is yelling. Gentle purple and bulging out of all of its sides, a roil of diffuse colour, it’s laid out across the sky above the spruce and the rock lichen, watching. Yelling at you, especially when you refuse to hear that you are a speck of dust on the edge of something that actually means nothing at all. Like all of us. Like every single one of us.

Spend a little time tonight — before the toasts and the fireworks and the hale and hearty backslapping friendships and the noise.

Spend a little time thinking about that.

Stars will cycle. Rivers will flow and curve.

We are all small. Just guests here. But not too small to be left unable to make a difference.

The best of New Year’s resolutions actually have nothing to do with you.

Not your weight or your bad habits.

Resolve to be better.

The rivers will roll, with or without you.

The rivers will roll.