Word.

Perseverance: My 2022 has mostly been defined by the will to persevere.

It is entirely human to be imperfect. It is entirely human to be flawed. It is entirely human to have certain prejudices and have internalized some of the more dubious characteristics of the place and time we live in or the pain of the environment we grew up in. No one is above the terrifying and miraculous mess of our species. Humans have the capacity for moments of brilliance and goodness, but also an awful lot of fucking up. If we see problematic people only as “people other than us,” we are never going to have the courage to transform ourselves. And it does take courage to persevere.

Courage, as Maya Angelou put it, is the most important of the virtues because “without courage we cannot practice any other virtue with consistency.” Courage is essential for us to look at ourselves without shying away. And, of course, if we make it entirely forbidden to be problematic, we are never going to admit to or address or fix our own flaws with honesty. We need open light to grow. Virtue isn’t something we gain simply by pointing to bad things outside ourselves and making ourselves feel good by contrast. True virtue is something we achieve by looking inward, to our own motives and flaws and cravings, and addressing those sticky and difficult things.

Image: Someone asked me, how courage looks like?

The hardest thing to be is yourself. We are so overloaded that we can’t always see the truth of who we are. We distract ourselves to distraction. Sometimes we clutter our lives deliberately to take our minds off the clutter inside our heads. When we take the external clutter away, we have to face the clutter inside ourselves. All the mess. And the more we focus on it, the more we see the order in it. There is a reason why everything is where it is. We might want to order the mess a different way, or we might feel the mess is perfectly fine. But we are imperfect because we are alive.

We are messy because the universe began with an explosion and the debris has drifted ever since. We are all messy mammals on a messy planet in a messy cosmos. To deny mess is to deny who we are. To be honest with oneself brings beauty to the mess.

2022 has been real and beautiful. I am grateful for my family and friends who’ve been there, all along.

Wishing love, light, joy and health! ❤️