From Horribilis to Mirabilis

I didn't get quite as much out of those Latin classes I sat through in Form III and IV back in my prep school days. The appeal, if I may use that word in choosing Latin in a school where everyone was enrolled in a language, was supposed to be the wonders it would work on my college SAT vocabulary skills. 

Between us, I was well on my way to developing a very colorful vocabulary riding the trains, buses, and subways to get to and from school every day (but knew better than to show off those words at the dinner table). Hand on my heart, the only thing I got out of Caesar's Gallic Wars was all of Gaul was divided into three parts, and though I loved the musicality of reading aloud Cicero's Orations, Ovid's Metamorphoses left no marks anywhere. 

And I'm not sure how much of all of that school-boy Latin I needed to appreciate a description of 2020, which ends not with a bang but a whimper this Friday morning, as annus horribilis, a year of disaster.

Certainly sounds about right, doesn't it? At least at first glance and don't worry I'm not going to offer you my rose-colored glasses in an attempt to reinvent a past we've all just barely survived with skill and luck. But, and here's my point, we did. 

We got up every day and did what we needed to do for ourselves, our families and friends, and our communities. Our need to learn new skills and new ways to do things may have vastly exceeded our desire to do either, but we persisted and we're about to start on the next chapter of the voyage with lessons learned no one can ever take away from us. 

I'm revisiting something I wrote years ago at this time not so much because my circumstances haven't changed (they have) but because who we are invites and incites me to dream a bigger dream of who we might yet become. 

Let's face it if we don't live large, what's the point of it all? This close to the Next Year, rather than rue and regret what has been, perhaps we might better prepare for what is to come (assuming we believe ourselves to have any control over what is to come). 

I've met people who see themselves as hostages of Cruel Fate or an Indifferent Deity as if we had been plopped down here and just abandoned to our own devices. Sorry, I must most respectfully disagree. Yes, we are each our own Captains, metaphorically lashed to the mast of the ship that's our life, seemingly alone in a vast ocean of souls, but it's a big ocean and yet we've all found ourselves here somehow and, at least for me, calling that coincidence isn't really going to ever explain the how much less the why.

Might I point out that 2020, with a sense of urgency none of us could have ever guessed, should have made us focus on answering an age-old question: how do we make our lives have meaning beyond our own lifetimes?

OK, that's not the cheeriest of questions to ponder while the old year's days creep slowly to their appointed end while we embrace the next that's yet to be. And if the question disquiets you, what of the answer?  

In New England, and across these United States, we are surrounded by memorials in stone, from monuments to buildings, dedicated to the selfless sacrifice of all those who have preceded us--who left their mark and who have set the bar, so to speak, for the rest of us to clear, each in her and his own way. 

Not each of us can be a general (where would we put all those statues and what about the pigeons?), but all of us can be generous. We each have the power to save the world, at least the small plot of it on which each of us stands. Where can we be this time next year if we strive to be great at this time this year? 

We are about to have a new year with which to work upon an answer that eclipses any need to ever worry again about how we choose to define ourselves. 2021 will be here in little more than a moment. Let's make sure it finds us ready and willing to make it truly annus mirabilis, a year of miracles.

-bill kenny