by PC Muñoz
“This country wants nostalgia. They want to go back as far as they can, even if it's only as far as last week.
Not to face now or tomorrow, but to face backwards.”
If you are reading this, you are in possession of an intricate array of gifts, skills, and privileges.
You have access to the internet and the know-how to navigate to a specific site. You likely have functioning eyes or the ability to decipher text without them. You are able to read, comprehend, and learn in at least one language. And you have excellent, unimpeachable taste in reading material. You are, in many ways, exceedingly fortunate.
After negotiating the literally biohazardous years of 2020 and 2021 and now preparing for the ongoing disease minefield of 2022, it’s easy to forget that we are living in amazing times. And it’s even easier to forget that much about our own lives is amazing, albeit never perfect.
It’s especially easy to long for the “before times” — before COVID-19 changed all of our lives permanently. Before the hospitalizations, the deaths, the closures of all kinds, the Zoom meetings, the constant sanitizing, the mask wearing, the vaccine drama, the booster drama, the rapid antigen tests, the PCR tests...before all of that. Those times are never coming back. We’re headed somewhere else.
The titular line above — “There is only going forward, there is never going back” — is from an adventurous recording of mine called “Rugged Individual”, which takes a critical look at the complicated myths of the American West over a bubbling free-jazz/electronica undercurrent. I wrote it while staying near the Donner Summit in the Sierra Mountains and thinking about my maternal-side relatives who made the wagon train journey to California in the 19th century. It’s comforting to indulge in romantic notions about the experiences of our ancestors; to feel nostalgia for times we ourselves have never experienced (there’s a proposed word for that phenomenon: anemoia). The truth is, I don’t want to be on a wagon train journey in the 19th century. I also don’t want to go back to the 20th century. I definitely don’t want to be in 2019, and I absolutely don’t want to be back in the middle of last week. I want to be right here, right now — with you and everyone else, building the future ahead of us. This is the journey of our time, and we are uniquely well-equipped to handle this.
But we’ve got to get excited about the task ahead of us. What will you do to contribute to the future that is just around the corner? How will you use your proven gifts, skills, and privileges?
You might want to start by saying “There is only going forward, there is never going back” out loud every morning when you wake up on this first week of 2022. Call it an attitude-hack.
Let me know how that works out for you. I’d love to hear your stories!
Happy New Year!
