Written by: Megan Bachman

The future enters into us, in order to transform itself in us, long before it happens. — Rainer Maria Rilke

New Year’s is a time of reflection and re-commitment. We review the past year to tie up loose ends and make plans to break bad habits or start healthy new ones in the year ahead. It’s like opening a window and letting in a fresh breeze. Change is in the air, possibilities abound and hope is abundant.

Yet the threshold between 2021 and 2022 feels different. We are entering the third year of a pandemic, processing — while still accumulating— trauma from all we’ve lost. We experience, or witness, shocking extreme weather events traced to our own climate complicity. The ongoing assault on our planet’s life support systems raises not just guilt and grief but also dread and despair. Our future seems dimmed, our footing on the planet tenuous.

As these anxieties swirl in the collective consciousness and media-sphere — in the “air” — it’s more important than ever to come back home, to ourselves and to our place in the world. It is where we meet and engage the world, and in a time of accelerated change, we must stay present. We need to learn to be “native to now” in the words of climate futurist Alex Steffan, recently quoted in the New York Times Magazine, because we are now “trans-apocalyptic,” beyond apocalypse. Our lives from here on out, he added, will be increasingly defined by “constant engagement with ecological realities.” 

Indeed, climate change is not only not ahead of us, but, as Timothy Morton observes, we are actually living inside the hyper-object known as global warming, a phenomenon that spans such vast scales of time and space as to be beyond human understanding. The idea is at once existentially terrifying and oddly liberating. Though we know that the planet is warming, we also know that there is so much we don’t know. The best way to know the whole — in this case the earth system we call Gaia — is to know our part. It may be all we ever truly know.

In my own life, in the new year, I want to live slower, smaller, with more questions and fewer answers. I want to pay attention to what is here, now, and what I can do, here. I want to live in the new, where hope is infinite, and not in the old, where fear keeps us frozen. As Arundhati Roy writes, the old system will collapse “if we refuse to buy what they are selling – their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.” “Another world is not only possible,” she adds, “she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.”

The new world is being born through us, but only when we are utterly open to it. In childbirth, the period of “transition,” when the cervix dilates the final few centimeters and the baby begins to descend, is marked by feelings of doubt and fear. I remember feeling, “I can’t do this; I can’t go on.” But in contrast to the later pushing stage, getting through transition involves letting go, surrendering to the body and its intelligence, and leaving behind one’s belief that something’s impossible for the belief in the miracle of creation.

Regeneration, after all, means to “create again,” and on planet Earth, in the year 2022, we are all being called to witness, and to engage, in the creation of a new world. That’s the threshold we are crossing, the rite of passage we are walking, and we do so together in a spirit of hope, adventure and humility.

As 2022 dawns, “Let us not look back in anger,” as James Thurber wrote, “nor forward in fear, but around in awareness.”