Agency is Mine

It finally ended. The year we all will never forget won't be with us any longer. Which means nothing, really, since 2020 didn't really bring us all the bad stuff we suffered through the last 12 months. In an effort to unload all of our frustrations about the things we would like to have happened differently this year, we are going to say "fuck you 2020", "good riddance", "2020, you will not be missed" etc. etc., but the reality is that calendars are nothing more than arbitrary cutoffs we agreed upon simply because we needed to keep track of time. This planet happens to circle our star once every 365 days, so we had to start counting one day out of those 365. That we started counting the terrestrial journey around the sun 6 days after winter solstice is as random as the reason why The Mona Lisa is the most admired work of art in human history --a guy made it famous (because he stole it), and then enough people agreed it was beautiful (why, I don't know; I think it's ugly AF, but I digress) and then nobody questioned it because nobody wanted to look like a fool. 

Of course it doesn't help that we anthropomorphize everything. We lend human qualities to inanimate and animate things, even to abstractions like the concept of a year. You name dogs, trees, and even accord human-like personalities to mechanical things like cars. I guess it helps us deal with reality, but you and I know deep inside of our souls the truth about this: 2020 didn't bring you the pandemic. Nor the Australian Fires. Nor the Locust Plagues of east Africa/Middle east. Nor the Lebanon blast. Nor the Social Unrest. We are just a bunch of simple-minded people who need to assign agency to external, abstract concepts in order to make sense of this chaotic reality. Accepting that we are at the mercy of mindless entropy is simply too scary a reality to contemplate. 

The only thing that we can say for sure about the "why" of all this is that it happened because we inhabit a universe ruled by chaos. Full stop. And not you, not me, not anyone can foresee what is going to happen next, or how the current events are going to influence future events. Yes, you have agency. You decide how to react to your environment, but you can't predict the future. At least not beyond certain horizon. Yes, you can infer. Yes, inertia and common sense might tell you the current state of things might extend into the immediate future. You might even estimate with statistics the probabilities of a future event, but outside of Newtonian physics, estimations are nothing but that: probabilities (ask Nate Silver about 2016 if you want to know what I mean). I am sorry to break it to you, but your sphere of influence is infinitesimal.   

And just like 2020 didn't bring you the pandemic, 2021 isn't gonna come riding a white horse to save you, either. The pandemic isn't magically going to go away simply because the top left corner of the screen on your phone has a "21" on it. 

But even infinitesimal is good. Your sphere of influence might be infinitesimal in the greater scheme of things, but it is humongous in the realm of the self. As I said, your agency belongs to you. Your perception belongs to you. 

If there is something the experience of living through "terrestrial journey around the sun number 2020 after the birth of Jesus" taught me, is that chaos is uncontrollable, but also that the self is fully controllable --that my agency is mine. That the perception of reality is what I make of it, and that the inputs I choose to deliver to my senses in the form of media consumption determine the color of the glasses I perceive reality through. When overconsumption of Twitter robbed me of sleep because it convinced me that the United States was succumbing to civil war, all it took was uninstalling the app to recover my ability to rest. When news story after news story hammered the idea that we were living through some sort of apocalypse, working out before dawn allowed me precious, brief moments to appreciate that I was able to breath in and out with ease --the very thing the virus robs you of! When the constant reminder of death bombarded me from every angle, I was able to appreciate every day I enjoyed blissful health. This is not to say I became a Buddhist monk. To reach that level of self-awareness is hard, but for the brief moments of blissful peace, I could see glimpses of what life could be, even in the midst of all this hellish chaos and suffering. 

So, yes, I have stuff to be thankful for the experience of having lived through "terrestrial cycle number 2020". Agency is mine, and yours is also yours.