On the Dawn of a New Decade

While of course decades are arbitrary delineations of time, and rebooting ones life and life themes can happen at any moment, I do love me an excuse to start anew. I plan to write more about why I love fresh starts in my belief that life is about constant self-improvement as part of my core belief that change and progress are in fact the only things constant in this universe. But for now, lets talk about the concept of for now. 

While the phrase did not enter my life immediately, “for now” has become the defining theme of my 2010s. It first entered my life as the title of the closing song of the musical Avenue Q, a favourite of mine which I first saw in February of 2011. At the time, I was about six months happily married, had just quit a good job because my depression made it impossible to do without crying and had recently discovered that I love New York City having been there on my honeymoon. The worst thing that had happened to me were various personal failures, attachment traumas but not Death Traumas. The concept of “for now” floated into my life and became a depression mantra as in “I’m only depressed for now.” As I went through deaths and births and a birth of a death in the decade, the acceptance of the grand impermanence of life became my guiding theme. Joy, pain, flowers, fascism, it’s all for now. It’s an edict to savour the good and survive the bad. 

It’s also a passive theme, one where you become water and accept flowing through life rather than harnessing the power of nature to act. At the close of 2019, I saw Frozen II (twice). I latched onto the final song in the film, “The Next Right Thing” in which a character overcomes grief and trauma to “do the next right thing” step by individual, pain-staking step, as sung by the wonderful, fellow-depressive Kristen Bell. It quickly became an anthem for keeping going on bad days for me. It’s not a new concept, but one that finally hit home: be patient, take life step by step, don’t “look too far ahead.” Just do the next right thing. Then in the past few days, I realized that this was to be the theme of my 2020s. The phrase “do the next right thing” starts with “do” the ultimate action word. I’ve struggled a lot with psychological paralysis in the past twenty years. This decade, I want to learn how to act. I don’t want to be passive any more. I want to take control over my time, wrest it from my mood. I don’t want to merely survive, I want to live and perhaps even thrive. And I want to learn how to be more active for the world. I’ve used the excuse of having depression to basically not be active against the evils of the world for too long. I want to learn how to make a difference, a real one. I want to do the next right thing, moment by moment, step by step. I want to move forward. 

So from water that flows without agency to learning how to jump over caverns and to throwing boulders at both my own depression dam and the walls of white supremacist cis-hetero patriarchy, this is my plan for a new decade: do. 

This post first appeared on my blog While of course decades are arbitrary delineations of time, and rebooting ones life and life themes can happen at any moment, I do love me an excuse to start anew. I plan to write more about why I love fresh starts in my belief that life is about constant self-improvement as part of my core belief that change and progress are in fact the only things constant in this universe. But for now, lets talk about the concept of for now. 

While the phrase did not enter my life immediately, “for now” has become the defining theme of my 2010s. It first entered my life as the title of the closing song of the musical Avenue Q, a favourite of mine which I first saw in February of 2011. At the time, I was about six months happily married, had just quit a good job because my depression made it impossible to do without crying and had recently discovered that I love New York City having been there on my honeymoon. The worst thing that had happened to me were various personal failures, attachment traumas but not Death Traumas. The concept of “for now” floated into my life and became a depression mantra as in “I’m only depressed for now.” As I went through deaths and births and a birth of a death in the decade, the acceptance of the grand impermanence of life became my guiding theme. Joy, pain, flowers, fascism, it’s all for now. It’s an edict to savour the good and survive the bad. 

It’s also a passive theme, one where you become water and accept flowing through life rather than harnessing the power of nature to act. At the close of 2019, I saw Frozen II (twice). I latched onto the final song in the film, “The Next Right Thing” in which a character overcomes grief and trauma to “do the next right thing” step by individual, pain-staking step, as sung by the wonderful, fellow-depressive Kristen Bell. It quickly became an anthem for keeping going on bad days for me. It’s not a new concept, but one that finally hit home: be patient, take life step by step, don’t “look too far ahead.” Just do the next right thing. Then in the past few days, I realized that this was to be the theme of my 2020s. The phrase “do the next right thing” starts with “do” the ultimate action word. I’ve struggled a lot with psychological paralysis in the past twenty years. This decade, I want to learn how to act. I don’t want to be passive any more. I want to take control over my time, wrest it from my mood. I don’t want to merely survive, I want to live and perhaps even thrive. And I want to learn how to be more active for the world. I’ve used the excuse of having depression to basically not be active against the evils of the world for too long. I want to learn how to make a difference, a real one. I want to do the next right thing, moment by moment, step by step. I want to move forward. 

So from water that flows without agency to learning how to jump over caverns and to throwing boulders at both my own depression dam and the walls of white supremacist cis-hetero patriarchy, this is my plan for a new decade: do. 

This post first appeared on my blog https://thewordscomeinwaves.com/ in 2020.