I thought about it all holiday season, about what I was going to wish you (or us) for the coming year. Maybe that’s just why the inspiration didn’t come deep down, because I was expecting it too much. I tracked her through family parties, viruses that ruin everything, and retro-movie-chicken-soup-in-the-living-room nights. All those who write, and finally, all those who create, know it well: inspiration is a wild animal which, as soon as it spots us, perched at the very top of our watchtowers, begins to flee us with an address which will only be matched by this joy that we will perhaps experience, if he finally agrees to come back to us, after we have lowered our weapons!
Nevertheless, it was running through my head, this list, mobilizing my thoughts, already, in this in-between state of the early morning, just before the first coffee, when I don’t yet know if I accept that the night is well and truly over. I wondered what we needed collectively, at the dawn of another year of going through this strange era where enthusiasm is often suspect, as long as we also claim a certain lucidity about the state of things.
Yes, the need to combine hope, necessary revolt and awareness of one’s privileges calls for an increasingly complex presence in the world to support, it seems to me. What do we do then when we are still there, in this world, and the little decision-making square that belongs to us, as citizens, seems to us to always shrink a little more around us, becoming almost stuck to our skin, reinforcing this individualizing view of things?
While our feeling of responsibility increases in the face of what is happening in the world, we are also, paradoxically, more and more often seized by our powerlessness to transform what seems to us to be happening well above our small people.
How, then, can we still walk, carry hope for our children, above all renew a form of optimism which is neither stupid nor blind, but only planted towards the possibility which inhabits our futures? What can we wish for the collective, when we are so aware of what is suffering in the individuality of our psychiatrists’ offices?
Always thinking about my wishes for you, this cul-de-sac of thought found me and completed my momentum, leaving me dried up from my desire to say.
But this morning, upon waking up, in this space where the blinding sun of rationality had not yet had time to chase away the magical mists of dreams, once the wild animal was recognized in its wild aspect, once my weapons lowered and the watchtower abandoned, the list of my wishes came back to me transformed, all dressed up in new words, made of desires, far from the materialism bordering on disgust that I still seem to have felt during these festivities. So here it is for you, my list of words shrouded in a desired vagueness, preserved, honored in what it will leave room for your imagination.
For 2024, I wish us a large dose of doubt, a rehabilitation of this precise state of in-between which perhaps inhabits you too, in the early morning, somewhere between night and day, on the edge of worlds of dreams and reality, where these things that are difficult to classify but essential to life reside, such as intuition, sensitivity, feeling.
To speak the language of my friend Jung — yes, forgive me, I’m starting the year with him again — I wish us more anima for the next year.
The anima, for Jung, is simply the soul. It is the part of oneself that tells us something about our interiorities, but not in a vision turned on oneself, closed to others, individualistic or egoic, no. Anima is the call of our interiority which will always lead us to greater openness towards the world.
A bit like Alice, who follows the white rabbit down to the earthly world, towards a strange and wonderful world, I wish us to cultivate curiosity about what escapes us within ourselves, about what surprises us, about what was not not scheduled. I wish us to meet dozens of white rabbits, who would guide us without us realizing it towards interior worlds still unsuspected, little known to us, which would make us expand the cartography of our personal territories. I wish us to dare, like the courageous Alice, to have tea with our inner crazy people, to modify the perceptions we have of ourselves, to take the journey that would allow us to transform ourselves, to become someone more aware of what he carries within him, and who, as a result, will necessarily be more open, less judgmental, more capable of living together.
Because each person who clears their soul, who accepts the games of mirrors, who tolerates not fixing their perception of themselves to only what suits them to think, is a person more open to encountering otherness, to learning from the other, by protecting herself less, by feeling less threatened. I therefore wish us more curiosity, less rigidity, more “I-don’t-knows”, fewer clear-cut and sharp opinions about others. I also wish us to accept the mystery of the other as an invitation to travel, to see what we hate, what we despise in the other as a perverted reflection of what we perhaps cannot achieve. completely to be honored in itself.
I wish us a community which would come together in ways other than uniting against the same enemies, which would also come together without ironing out the singularities of each and every one.
I wish us to each clear our little patch of garden, agreeing to dig deep into our souls, to go, perhaps, to join the roots of shared humanity, which would form an interconnected network far beneath the earth. It is this radicality, perhaps, that we will need for the rest of the world, that which fully honors the etymology of the word: radicality, of the root word.