This Is Life: 10 Writers on Love, Fear, and Hope in the Age of Disasters

Introduction

IT’S BEEN A LONG, long couple of years. A global pandemic. A planet on the verge of climate catastrophe. Ever deepening racial and political divides, ever growing economic inequality. Increasingly divergent realities when it comes to science, and to truth. In short, not good. As we embark on yet another uncertain trip around the sun, we have to ask: How’s everyone doing?

In the pages that follow, ten of our favorite writers offer their answers to the question. They share honest, occasionally comic, occasionally biting insights into the past two years and deliver advice about resilience, compassion, and taking refuge in the right now. They articulate the anxiety of these inarguably lousy times yet also remind us that there is still so much to celebrate, every day: a child playing the piano, a really good whisky, the frantic grace of a hummingbird. We hope their messages help you chart your way forward and reimagine the future with hope. —The Editors

Still

By Jacqueline Woodson

TONIGHT, JUST PAST the sprinklers, there is a different hissing of summer lawns. A desperation no Joni Mitchell song can ever lilt or trill away. And still, she is with me now on this otherwise glorious summer night. I know her music well. Have come to love the arc of her poetry, the stories she has given me inside the songs, the simple moments she butters with light and color and sound. So it makes sense that she is who I am thinking of now as some poor animal’s fear cuts through the barking of my dog. In the darkness, he has found something. Something small. And frightened. Earlier in the day, as I drove home, I listened to a reporter talk about a sanctuary for abandoned chimpanzees. In the background, the crying chimps sounded like human babies. I found myself fighting back tears. It has come to this: our empathy in our throats if we’re still breathing, helpless as a Neil Young song. I call for the dog again even though I know, until this moment is over, he won’t return. It’s a hot evening in July. But somewhere, there is a Chelsea morning with milk and toast and honey. Somewhere, there is just a little green. And crocuses. Always from this moment on, there are clouds that we as a world have looked at from both sides now.

Once as a child, I caught fireflies inside of jars, laughing open-mouthed at the immensity of my own joy. That was South Carolina in the seventies, where even as the tendrils of Jim Crow wrapped themselves around us, we remembered that we were children. Protected. Loved. We knew this because we skipped wherever we went, ran when skipping didn’t get us there fast enough, and jumped simply because we could. We learned that we could leap into the air and click our heels together. We could spin until we fell down, still laughing. We teased the adults into tickling us, at once elated and terrified. We were magic then. Some days as a child, I woke smiling, having dreamed I could actually fly.

This is something I’ve learned to breathe in again, exhale out. Remember Joy, I tell myself—in all the ways you can find it every day. I don’t tell myself that joy is fleeting. That Time is a beloved beast. My self already knows that. I tell myself to hug my children even as they grimace and pull away. I tell myself to be still when they lean against me on the couch, where the warmth of our arms touching is as familiar as the years-ago absolute sweetness of their sour infant’s breath. All of it fragile. All of it the long days and short years I was warned about as a young mother. Here is where the future begins, isn’t it? In the small gifts we’ve learned to give ourselves—an added grateful at the evening meal. A thank-you to the ancestors and higher powers that have granted us another day on an earth that is buckling and flaming and drowning beneath the weight of us. An earth that, like us, is trying to hold on. And still, the gifts come quietly. Someone who has died suddenly visiting in a dream. Another candle on a birthday cake and loved ones circling you again. New wrinkles around eyes, new gray hair dappling temples, the weight of them, both lost and gained. I take into this new future all of it—all of what I’ve lost and gained, remembered.

Years ago, doctors told my grandmother she’d have to change her diet if she wanted to live longer. She was eighty-two. Don’t you want to one day meet your great-grandchildren? I asked her. Listen, she said, if I want to eat a piece of fried salmon, I’m gonna eat a piece of fried salmon. It would have been rude to tell a dying woman that salmon doesn’t even taste good fried. Broiled maybe, with olive oil, salt, pepper, and, in the end, a drizzle of balsamic—or pan-seared with a side of lentils. I bit my tongue and said nothing. She thought I thought I knew everything. I knew some things. She knew so much more. And died a year later, her cherished salmon eaten many times before she left this place.

I take into this new future my love for her. I talk to her often now, tell her what I didn’t say while she was living, that there are so many better ways to eat her treasured fish. That I should have cooked for her more. I tell her that only fish has survived in our house, where meat has become the devil. My darling giving it up first, ditching it when that wretched man said meat-packers were essential workers. My daughter next—vegan for six seconds then pescatarian then vegetarian then pescatarian again. In my talks with my grandmother, she doesn’t ask me what a vegan is. Her response is already there—a side-eye that says, That must be the white in her, cuz no Black folks trying not to eat what’s in front of them. I tell her I just read an article about Black folks being the fastest-growing vegan population in the country. If she were still living, she’d shake her head. She wouldn’t ask if I was giving up butter, milk, and cheese. She wouldn’t have to. Both of us already know