Aspiration, Optimism, and Existential Touchstones: A Message for the New Year from Big Heavy World
A message from James Lockridge, Executive Director, Big Heavy World
Every new year comes with a moment of silent reaffirmation that it will be filled with aspiration and optimism. Aspiration demands a tax of personal labor; optimism demands confidence in the values that inspire it.
While ephemeral culture wars and wars of actual aggression char our era, we still have existential touchstones that aren’t dislodged by caprice. At the front of these is the value we know simply as fairness. We’ve learned to tie our histories together, to shoulder toward the future as a society within a framework of government that grounds us in mutual expectations. One of those expectations is that when we all contribute to advancing our experience as a community, we should all benefit from this investment.
Big Heavy World has been committed to inclusion since it was established in 1996. It has grown through many stages and explored depths of understanding that were often new to us. In our 25+ years, we’ve made mistakes, including those of inherited systemic ignorance and misplaced trust. And we’ve also re-committed, over and over each year, to a vision of serving our community in increasingly equitable and more effective ways. Our aspiration pairs with the labor we commit to it, and our optimism comes from a pure confidence that pursuing fairness and inclusion is a duty. We’ll be very good at it soon; in the meantime, we’re practicing every day.
While our head is down into this work, we send a fond wish to everyone that you’ll take the time and find the strength to commit to the values that are most important to you, as well. And that you’ll examine whether your choices are accurate expressions of those values.
As an organization that serves Vermont’s community of musical artists, these recent words from President Biden had a special meaning. "The arts, the humanities, and museum and library services are essential to the well-being, health, vitality, and democracy of our Nation. They are the soul of America, reflecting our multicultural and democratic experience. They further help us strive to be the more perfect Union to which generation after generation of Americans have aspired. They inspire us; provide livelihoods; sustain, anchor, and bring cohesion within diverse communities across our Nation; stimulate creativity and innovation; help us understand and communicate our values as a people; compel us to wrestle with our history and enable us to imagine our future; invigorate and strengthen our democracy; and point the way toward progress.” (President Joseph R. Biden Jr., September 30, 2022)
President Biden reminds us how fundamental the arts are to our human experience, and how integral they are to the acts of democracy that shape our future. As an artist, do your choices set a positive example to others, pointing each person toward their own potential? As a Vermonter, do you expect others to commit to the same labor you give in creating a just and empowering state, and do you offer a helpful reminder? As an instrument of government, have you committed the people’s treasure to a cause of truly serving all the people? Human nature has always provided examples of poor choice-making. Emotion, privilege, and naïveté misdirect us all at some point. But the turn toward every new year provides an opportunity to anchor ourselves and invite again — in the words of a different president — the better angels of our nature. Human nature includes good choices, too, and Big Heavy World sends encouragement for a year full of them.
Image: ‘The Concert’ by Gerrit van Honthorst, 1623, courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.