In the face of calamity, sometimes all you can do is put one foot in front of the other until you get to a better place.Illustration by Hanna Barczyk
The heels of my walking boots were worn away, and it was hard not to see this as a metaphor. Everything has been ground down over the past two years: patience, hopes, molars. Still, they’re good boots, and I wasn’t ready to throw them out.
My old shoe repair guy had closed down, which suggested that the little hand-lettered sign stuck in his window for the past year (“business for sale”) had not lured any aspiring cobblers. I found a new shoe repair guy, whose name is Sam and who immediately buoyed my spirits with the magic words, “I fix for you.”
“I’ve been walking a lot, Sam,” I told him. Sam nodded, and it occurred to me it was not the first time he’d been confronted with battered souls and their worn-down soles. “Everybody walking,” he said, in the same fatalistic tones that my Italian grandfather used whenever he pulled out his favourite expression, “Whatta can you do?”
I bought the boots (black, with a feisty orange stripe on the zipper) in Berlin in December, 2019, not knowing they would be on my feet almost every day for the next two years of plague, as I walked and walked and walked. I’m grateful they’ve held up. I’m grateful they’ve held me up.
After an endless ride on the gloom train, writing columns about violence and political unrest and attacks on health care workers and climate change, it seemed time to disembark for a moment and appreciate the good and hopeful things that got me through the year. Some of them are tiny and trivial, some monumental. I haven’t decided yet which category to put “funny cat videos” in.
I’m grateful, for example, for the great reckoning, which has people reconsidering what ambition means to them. Younger people are quitting jobs that treated them as interchangeable cogs in a money-making machine, and posting their hilarious quitting notes online. Older people are rethinking their career paths. Labour movements have got their mojo back. How we can think differently about our ambitions for our lives has become a defining question of this time. All of this taken together has sparked “a deeper discussion about the relentless pursuit of wealth, at the individual level and for nations as a whole.” That line appeared recently in Bloomberg Businessweek, by the way, and not the Socialist Worker.
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Most of the things that brought me joy this year were pretty low-fi: my boots, old Al Green LPs, musty paperbacks I found in little libraries outside people’s houses. My bike, my family and friends, my predictably idiotic cats.
But the world of technology brought surprising moments of happiness, too. William Shatner, aged 90, spun an impromptu poem of rapture as he emerged from the Blue Origin capsule that sent him into space. “Look down and there’s the blue down there, and the black up there. There is Mother Earth and comfort and there – is there death?”
I did not have William Shatner tripping about the wonders of the cosmos on my 2021 bingo card. But I also didn’t think I’d be captured by a robot the size of a pickup truck, which sailed down to the surface of Mars under a parachute that carried the coded message “dare mighty things.” For a few moments in February, I held my breath alongside NASA’s scientists, waiting for the Perseverance rover to land safely. It did, then crawled off to begin its amazing work collecting rocks that will tell the ancient history of the red planet.
It was comforting to be transported to distant planets while this one is on fire, which is perhaps why I was so enthralled by Denis Villeneuve’s big-screen adaptation of one of my favourite novels, Frank Herbert’s Dune. I was happy to be staring at any big screen, to be honest: Movie theatres have been a hugely important part of my life and for a while there it looked like the curtain was coming down for good. But then the lights flickered back on, and as soon as they did I returned to the cinema, visiting old friends like James Bond and new ones like Dev Patel’s Gawain battling the Green Knight.
By the end of the year, I felt like I’d been on a quest as long as Dev’s battle-weary old warrior, and I’m going to venture that 2021 perhaps had the same effect on you. I had to remind myself of all the good things that had helped me through, including book shops and bike lanes, music and edibles, reruns of the Baroness von Sketch Show and any movie starring Keanu Reeves. In fact you only have to listen to Keanu’s recent homage to the Toronto of his youth to understand the power of the small and mundane. The things that he loved were buses and hardware shops and movie theatres and libraries.
If nothing else, this year has taught me a little bit of the fatalism that helped my grandfather survive. In the face of calamity, what can you do? Sometimes all you can do is put one foot in front of the other, until you get to a better place. If I still believed in Santa Claus, I’d be asking for a more joyful 2022. Until then, I hope there are plenty of small things to help you through. Happy holidays, everyone.
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