What We Keep Doing Anyway

On care, persistence, and the quiet work that holds us together.

Inside, the quiet rituals of home. Outside, neighbours doing the work winter requires—together.

There’s something about late December that exposes what still works. In Canada, that often looks like quiet acts of care—at home, in communities, and in civic life.

This is what care looks like, up close.

The light fades early. The light fades early. The roads get harder. The calendar fills with obligations that feel heavier than usual. Systems creak. People are tired. And yet—somehow—certain things keep happening anyway.

Meals get made. Letters get written. Neighbours shovel not just their own walks, but the ones beside them. People take the time to explain something carefully, even when they could have scrolled past. Someone sits in a waiting room longer than planned. Someone answers a comment with patience instead of heat.

None of this makes headlines. But it is the quiet scaffolding that holds the place together.

This year, much of my writing has been about systems under strain—health care stretched thin, food costs pushing families to the edge, institutions struggling to meet the moment. Those are real pressures, and they matter. But alongside them, I’ve been struck by something else: the amount of unpaid, uncelebrated care Canadians continue to provide each other.

It shows up in small, practical ways.

In people who write thoughtful letters to their MPs—not because they expect a quick fix, but because staying silent feels like giving up. In readers who disagree with one another without reaching for cruelty. In those navigating appointments, paperwork, and worry with little external support—parents, seniors, caregivers, people living alone or far from family—who still take the time to check in on someone else. In communities quietly filling gaps that shouldn’t exist, but do. We don’t often call this civic life. We probably should.

Around Christmas, we’re encouraged to think about hope as a feeling—warm, bright, reassuring. But what I see, over and over, is hope as an action. Less about belief, more about persistence. Hope that looks like maintenance. Like showing up again, even when it would be easier not to.

This kind of care doesn’t come with ribbons. It isn’t particularly festive. It can be exhausting. But it is deeply human—and deeply political in the truest sense of the word. It’s how societies endure stress without hardening completely. It’s how trust survives when formal structures wobble.

Canada has never been held together by grand gestures alone. We are, at our best, a country of people who keep doing the necessary work even when the payoff isn’t immediate. Who understand that stability isn’t a given—it’s something you tend, like a fire in winter.

As this year winds down, I want to acknowledge that work.

To those who read carefully. To those who speak up thoughtfully. To those who care for family, neighbours, and strangers while carrying more than their share. To those who are tired and still trying.

None of this is small. It’s the real infrastructure beneath the visible one. And it deserves to be noticed.

If Christmas offers anything worth holding onto, it’s not the promise that things will suddenly get easier—but the reminder that we don’t face what’s hard alone.

Thank you for being part of that quiet, steady effort. We’ll need it again in the year ahead. And I have a feeling you’ll show up—because you always do.

---

A Christmas offering

Years ago, I made a small video using the final stanza of a poem by James Elroy Flecker — written by someone who could never know who would read him, or when.

“I send my soul through time and space to greet you.”

I’ve always thought of it as a quiet act of care — words offered forward without knowing who might need them. It feels fitting to share it again now, as a simple Christmas greeting. The full poem — not a traditional Christmas one — is transcribed below the video.

---

“TO A POET A THOUSAND YEARS HENCE”

I who am dead a thousand years,
And wrote this sweet archaic song,
Send you my words for messengers
The way I shall not pass along.

I care not if you bridge the seas,
Or ride secure the cruel sky,
Or build consummate palaces
Of metal or of masonry.

But have you wine and music still,
And statues and a bright-eyed love,
And foolish thoughts of good and ill,
And prayers to them who sit above?

How shall we conquer? Like a wind
That falls at eve our fancies blow,
And old Maeonides the blind
Said it three thousand years ago.

O friend unseen, unborn, unknown,
Student of our sweet English tongue,
Read out my words at night, alone:
I was a poet, I was young.

Since I can never see your face,
And never shake you by the hand,
I send my soul through time and space
To greet you. You will understand.

By James Elroy Flecker (1884-1915).

---

Words travel in ways we can’t always see.
If this one feels worth sending forward — to someone near or far — please do. I’d like to think it might meet them at the right moment.
With you in spirit,

Leni