I was walking with my daughter one recent afternoon, the sun was still high enough to throw out heat, but a light southerly was taking the edge off it. We weren’t walking anywhere special, or anywhere stunningly beautiful or inspiring, just around the streets where we live.
I mentioned in passing how much I really liked this dead part of the year (not by design we were passing the local cemetery) when after Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the wheels of the world seem to slow down a cog, the air seems to empty of noise, the roads of cars. The buzz of the daily humdrum subsides, just for a few weeks. It is as if you can breathe just a little more deeply. Time transforms from a jet plane moving too fast (apologies to Dylan) to a shimmer of light that stretches to the horizon.
Time for contemplation.Credit: Warwick McFadyen
It also allows the annual occupation of the dreamer to materialise more into focus, which is to wonder what this year will bring. Given that time is an eternal continuum and the calendar under which we live is a human construct, the stillpoint of this question is purely arbitrary. But here I was at such a stillpoint, thinking of what had occurred in the past year, and asking is there an event, a series of events or even random acts that can instil faith in this year being an improvement on the last?
Although the world hasn’t seen a conflict like World War II, nor the deaths of tens of millions from that war or WWI, the number of conflicts worldwide in 2024 meant tens of thousands of people were killed or injured, most notably in the Gaza War and the Ukraine-Russia conflict. Last year was not the exception in human misery wrought from armed conflict. This year won’t be the exception in it stopping.
In such times it is easy to believe that faith in good prevailing is a casualty. Indeed if one were to live a life solely on the diet of humankind’s inhumanity to itself one would wilt under the weight. Where to find faith in seeing progress in the evolution of good triumphing over the evil that people can bring is most often found in the reaction to that inhumanity. This is the spiritual parallel to the equation that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. This is the kindness of strangers, writ large and small.
The absence of traffic changes the pace of thought. Credit: Emilio Morenatti /AP
This is where faith is born, and grows, in the garden of our souls where belief and sheer stubbornness delivers to each day a strength of will to treat people as you would want them to treat you. If that is too much to ask, what then?
As I walked with my daughter in the quiet streets, I gave a prayer, let us all be gardeners.
Warwick McFadyen is an Age desk editor.