Bowie & 2016

I woke up too early and found this and I can’t stop thinking about it. I hit a wall after he died with listening to Blackstar, an album I enjoyed to an almost fanatical degree when it came out. It became more painful to listen to and I retreated to my Five Years box set. But I did eventually get back to it. And it is hard not to view the album through the lens of this mess of a year.

There was a popular Twitter post shared at the start of the year… “I’M NOT SAYING THAT DAVID BOWIE WAS HOLDING THE FABRIC OF THE UNIVERSE TOGETHER BUT… [GESTURES BROADLY AT EVERYTHING]”

And that felt accurate a couple months into 2016, and that was before it became a cavalcade of death, professional shifts, global horrors, financial troubles, friends going through hard times and… oh, yeah, 20% of the country helped Russia put Trump in power.

But it’s easy to feel apocalyptic. We humans are good at it. It’s harder to see the blessings. The family and friends who are a part of our lives. The joys small and large. And the fact we are alive to change—ourselves and the world around us. That’s no small thing.