fullman*

Posts Tagged ‘New Year’

Today I decided to stay put and hunker down. The year has just ended, and in a few days I am turning 32.

You have to admit that 2009 was a strange year: it had 3 arms, an extra face, a 13th month that had 365 days. It was as if each day is always bent on eating the next one, each week cannibalizing the entire month, scattering red entrails on the floor: typhoons, floods, immorality, backhoes, Gloria, an almost eruption.

A pause then is important. 2009 deserves a proper burial. A comma is not enough, this year demands a period, a full stop.

From where I am I can see an ant pursuing a scent. It has no other agenda, no flash flood to worry about, no relief goods to pack. No Zen profundity to its movements, just the single-mindedness of a line.

We need to treat this year as if it were a line that unravels. Last year was a border.

I stretched and my feet touched China. A physiological feat, but what for? We only need to look around us, stare at each other, to know that we carry our own Great Walls.

Last year, I urged a few friends and some kindred spirits to pluck their hearts and wear them on their sleeves. I did. There was blood trickling down my arm, but it didnt give me love. Instead, my heart was yanked away, and all that remained was a bloody scribble on the pavement: I was here.

But who cares. Take it away, the heart doesnt grow still anyway. When excited it cavorts with the throat. When cold, it clenches itself. When broken it doesnt smash, it implodes and eats itself. When lonely, it wanders. Lonelier, it logs in, uploads, and updates its status.

Quote me if Im wrong, the heart is never still.

Last year, you jumped and I didnt follow. When I finally did I was already on my own. So dont blame me if I didnt welcome the new year with a jump: Id rather begin with a full stop.

What is celebrated with the passing of a year, other than the possibility of a new chance, is the resilience of memory. We look forward to a new year with a vow to remember the previous ones, the past mistakes and victories and the unusual joy in committing them.

We celebrate a new year with a toast for the previous ones: there are no regrets. The scary thing about adulthood is that we must own up to our own mistakes, our flaws. Strangely, that’s also the liberating part of it. A life without any error is a life spent without love. What we are passionate about is bound to push us to make mistakes, the moral lesson of chasing our dreams. A poet said that a shard of glass thrown into the ocean would certainly come out changed, its clear and shiny skin smoothened and dulled by the rough edges of the sand: a piece of glass becoming the ocean itself.

2007 wasn’t such a bad year. Here’s to the remembrance of a year of deep frustrations that taught us in Akbayan the miraculous art of climbing higher. Here’s to a cat that stayed with us for just a year, who was fiercely sovereign but endured lessons on how to speak in Portuguese and how enunciate English verbs that start with the letter E. Here’s to Here’s to the great love that has eluded (some of) us, may we catch it finally this year. And here to 2007, the year I finally learned how to say no (and no, actually, means no), even to a movement that has always been the source of my passion. The sky didn’t collapse, there are no regrets.

May the new year be as meaningful.