I typed this into my phone in January.
Story idea: Hindsight is 2020. I was encouraging myself to dedicate the year ahead to a more disciplined approach to writing, thinking that I'd have something unique to observe and report on by the time everything was covered in glee. I was hopeful that 2020 might give me stuff to think and write about. Wonder how that pans out for January Ari.
December Ari is mostly in awe of lessons learned in 2020. Here are a few broader lessons I've learned, presented through hindsight.
I have profound concerns about how we all use social media and hope to write a book one day that tackles a mindful approach to its usage. That said, in 2020, social media proved itself to be a reliable and relatively stable way to stay connected. We were habitually using social networks in very similar ways before the events of this year, but it gained new usefulness when we were always distant from one another.
Social media brought me into the homes and spaces of everyone on my feed. It got quite raw, honest, and authentic in many cases, which is one of my most favorite qualities. These networks can be lousy with vanity, but in 2020, much of it was underpinned by authenticity and creativity. It taught me to read things in my friends' voices, rather than in my own voice, or in some monotone and sterile delivery. When you read something your friend wrote, and it invokes memories of their nuances and quirks, it makes them so real in your mind. It turns out that the idiosyncratic memories are three dimensional.
My new favorite quality, joining the ranks with authenticity, is resiliency. I find myself reflecting most often on a new appreciation for what it means to be resilient. Not just to survive something, but to endure it. No matter how well we've clawed our way to get here, I look around at everyone I know with such deepened respect because I know we're all fighting resiliently against our breaking points.
But it's also just so darn holistically wonderful as well. I've met your pets and your kids, and your neighborhoods. I've seen your genuinely creative solutions to making memorable experiences for loved ones in less-than-ideal scenarios. I've watched you bake bread and cookies. I've watched you make your favorite drinks. One of my favorite things… she'll kill me for this…is that a friend has started consistently posting these little one-story Instagram book reports, and they are the most compelling critiques I've read all year. I've seen your bathrooms and your home studios. I've seen the art you make. I've seen many of you dance. A lot of you like to dance. I am programmed to hate people who dance, but the truth is, I adore the fact that you use your bodies for self-expression! I've seen you lose people. I've seen you do it alone. I've seen you lose your minds - we all have, it's OK. I've seen the movies you love. I've seen the music that sustains you. I've seen you talk about life. I've seen you talk about race. I've seen you talk about politics, and also governance, policy, equity, and fairness. I've seen you laugh and cry, sometimes in the same day or the same hour. I've seen the gifs you use and the memes you repeat. Some of your memes could be better, but man, your gif game is strong. I've seen you get angry, and I've learned to remember that anger doesn't look good on me or anyone, so it's good to get it out. I've seen you discover things. I've seen you build things. I've seen you burn things. I've seen you repurpose things.
“It turns out that the idiosyncratic memories are three dimensional.”
I have seen you in my day-to-day, often with a level of intimacy that none of us have ever considered before. 2020 became the year my friends, family, and coworkers watched me from a well-lit corner of my bedroom through an HD webcam and a low-latency broadband connection. Every day required camera-readiness, not just for myself, but for my office, bedroom, and tons of other personal spaces as well. January Ari had such an adorable ignorance, didn't he?
While I didn't get to see many of you in real life, I did get to see a lot more of your lives, and I know you better for it. At the dawn of this year, I worried that app stories were turning us all into our own branded TV channels, but instead, it showed us resilience and how we all survived. Each one of us had a unique and wholly unprecedented experience with this year. Seven-and-a-half billion unique and unprecedented experiences, each happening simultaneously on the only known planet with life in an infinite universe. It seems criminal to spend too much time looking back on a year in which so many of us screamed "onward!"
But glimpsed like this through the power of hindsight, I can say with total certainty that 2020 brought me closer to you, even though it kept us apart. December Ari really loves learning these lessons. But now it's enough. Once again, onward. It's almost time for January.