I'm Major Jackson, and this is the slowdown.

The clocks have struck another year.

Soon, I will box up an archive 2023 in the mental basement of my mind.

Although, I'm sure certain events of the past 365 days will reverberate in both predictable

and not so predictable ways into the future.

Personally speaking, 2023 was a year of milestones.

I would likely not experience so auspicious a year for a long time.

Receiving the Academy of American Poets Fellowship for Distinguished Poetic Achievement,

publication of my six book, Razzle-Dazzle, new and selected poems, induction into the American

Academy of Arts and Sciences, and hosting The Slowdown, this daily podcast.

Yet this year, violence and unrest pervaded my conscience, wars whose travesties played out

in the palm of my hand while commuting. Unprecedented leaps in technology engendered ethical

debates with colleagues. The summer of 2023 was the hottest on record. These were once

unimaginable events that I personally did not see coming, which made me feel at times powerless.

So today, I will not make promises to do better, to live healthier, or to save money.

These are natural and valid attempts to regulate a future that is impossible to know.

But I will abandon the ritual of unwrapping a fresh package of new resolutions,

which filled individual in nature.

They perpetuate a myth of self-sufficiency.

Instead, I wish to live daringly in community and to accept the challenges our collective moment has to offer.

I won't look away in an attempt to live an anxiety-free life.

Today's poem makes a powerful assertion that may be what we bring to the problems of the world,

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