'Tis the Season for Joy and Peace

'Tis the season for joy and peace — or so the songs insist, at the precise moment of the year when joy feels most scheduled and peace most elusive.

Look at what 2010 has served us. Secret cables spilling across front pages. A currency union questioning its own survival. Scandal after scandal in New Delhi, each larger than the last. A whistleblower on the run, a superpower embarrassed, and an internet that refuses to forget anything. It has been, by any measure, a loud year.

And now December arrives with its old demands: be joyful, be peaceful, be grateful. The shopping lists grow, the lights go up, the calendar fills with obligations wearing the costume of celebration. It is easy to feel that the season's message and the year's reality belong to different worlds.

But perhaps that is exactly the point. Joy and peace were never descriptions of the world as it is. They are assignments — things to practice precisely when circumstances don't support them. The family that gathers despite its disagreements, the neighbor who is kind without being asked, the stranger who is forgiven: these are not sentiments. They are decisions.

The year gave us plenty of reasons for cynicism. The season offers a counter-proposal, modest and stubborn: that joy is not the absence of trouble but the refusal to be defined by it, and that peace begins not in parliaments but at dinner tables.

'Tis the season. Take the assignment.