I started this year half-conscious with Covid in a ghost town that was once the pearl of the Salton Riviera. There’s some meaning in this I must share with you.

The Salton Sea lies deep in the desert of south-eastern California. It was created by accident in 1905, through an overflow of water engineers were diverting from the Colorado River to irrigate farmland to support a swelling population in the West. Long before that, there were villages here.

The town outside the window today is called Bombay Beach. Sixty years ago, this was a popular weekend holiday destination for families and fashionable people from Los Angeles. You can still see it, the 50s in the air, in the antique cars and pastel colors. Now, it’s a lesser tourist destination for the edgier of the Instagram influencer crowd angling for what Pinterest tells me is called “decay tourism.” You know the vibe: abandoned buildings, broken metal structures, bright graffiti, ironic art. Post-apocalypse chic.

The Salton, having no natural water source, is evaporating slowly over time. The shoreline has receded and is covered in the bones of dead fish. The towns are mostly deserted. The desert is striking and bleak. It’s the kind of place you’d think was day-dreamed up for a particularly cynical Lana Del Rey music video. The phrase “post-Americana” comes to mind. The phrase “rotten kitsch” comes to mind. Death and plastic come to mind. It’s an appropriate place to be sick.

As I start healing here, I feel I must tell you that this place is beautiful. It is a dry, cracked shell of what it once was, haunting and uncomfortable, the visual embodiment of decay, and it is beautiful. The artists who reclaimed this area have done so with a sincerity and humor. There’s a dusty drive in full of empty vintage cars you can sit in and watch a movie. Its creepiness is self-aware. It knows it’s expired and it’s owning it. Out of the blight has been born a special kind of life that only belongs to dead things, the way a ghost has personality.

This place is beautiful because people made it beautiful. It is beautiful now because it is dead, and people took that death and turned it into art. What I’m saying, in a roundabout kind of way, is that there’s a lesson in this.

No matter how self-assured I may sound about the future, the fact of the future remains that it is anyone’s game. Trends are only predictive until they are broken. One thing that seems assured about this era is that the certainties we once built our lives upon are now in question. The only thing we can predict is that what’s coming will not be predictable.

In the face of such uncertainty, we cling onto the past. All of us do it. Whether that past is a Norman Rockwell painting of 1950s American grandeur or whether it’s the sense of normalcy we halfway felt in 2015, we react to the chaos of the present by longing for some sort of return. When faced with the uncomfortable, we yearn for a comfort zone.

What I’m learning, day by day, is that there is no going back. The harder we run back towards the past, the further it retreats away from us. The more we deny the reality of present, the more what’s around us falls into decay. We cannot heal our present situation by pretending we can get rid of it.

If we cannot go back, and we don’t know what going forward will bring, it seems our only option is to exist in a limbo state of terrified paralysis, reacting as we have to when crises arise as we spin further and further out of control. Before this, I’d have told you that the answer is to surrender. Give up the reins. Let the uncertainty exhilarate you and trust in the current to pull you forward on its own.

It is still good advice, but living like that is easier said than done. I know it well myself —there are moments when it’s possible to float, but then the urge comes in to do something. We don’t know what to do. We can’t fix it, we can’t control it, but still, we know we must do something.

What we can do is do something beautiful. We can take what is around us, no matter how ugly it may seem, and do something beautiful with it. We can take this little step before us and make it beautiful. We can put what’s immediately in front of us into harmony. We can make this moment into art.

Some days, it seems everything in this world conspires towards our impotence. Illness and isolation, financial precarity and political disenfranchisement, the global scale of problems and bureaucratization of attempts to solve them — caught in this web, we have next to nothing.

What we always have is the power to respond to what’s immediately in front of us — to this place, this room, this neighborhood, this moment, these next five minutes. We have the inalienable power to choose what we do with them. Anything can get ugly if we let it fall into disrepair by continuously focusing our attention elsewhere.

I know that it’s hard to have faith when we have so little control. Sometimes you just can’t muster the will to surrender. I don’t know what’s coming next. I don’t know if we’ll see economic collapse or another pandemic, a civil war or deadlier natural disasters. I don’t know if we’ll hold it together. I don’t know if the kids will be alright.

What I know is that the future cannot be dealt with, whatever it may be, because it isn’t happening now. Only this is happening now. Give what’s here your undivided attention; don’t split yourself by longing for what isn’t. Take what’s here and turn it into art. Make it a monument to your humor and devotion.

When in doubt, do something beautiful.