THE ANNUAL..
That’s a wrap!
All those memes and jokes about the “worst year in history” are now behind. Suddenly people are social media blitzing their profile pictures and stories with happy and hopeful messages. Clearing out that dreaded ’20 from our sight and moving forward with open eyes to ’21..
We have done this before, as humanity.
This yearly ritual of desperation to end the morbid year we are in, and a new profound hope for the months to come.
With each New Years Eve kiss that turns into a drunken slobber fest after Midnight, we strike the usual tone. Year in and year out.
For as much as we want the time to change, we get stuck in our ways. We don’t change at all, don’t adjust.. don’t do anything much to lose weight, and decry the ‘terrible new year’ we are stuck in come February and March.
Heck sometimes even late January..
But maybe this time it will in fact be different.
2020 was a year made up of terrible mixtures of awful and perfect things. Working at home brought us closer to family and friends, but somehow made us distant from neighbors and loved ones who were the most dear to us before lockdowns.
It was filled with unprecedented death and heart ache, but yet joys and moments of inspiration.
For every drop of tear gas fired into crowds, there were tears of love at new life, new love, and equal amounts at the bedsides of those passing away from a rampant virus. For most, window-side as we were not allowed in to see loved ones during the most wrenching moment in a life..
2020 was unfair. And just.
2020 was the best of times. And yes clearly it contained the worst of times.
Some may argue that the new year and celebrations about it are pointless. That they don’t matter..
If it does not matter why did humanity take to the traditions so early? There has to be something special, no?
It wasn’t always filled with love and splendor of course.
In the year 46 B.C.E. the Roman emperor Julius Caesar first established January 1 as New Year’s day.
Janus was the Roman god of doors and gates, and had two faces, one looking forward and one back. Caesar felt that the month named after this god (“January”) would be the appropriate “door” to the year. Caesar celebrated the first January 1 New Year by ordering the violent routing of revolutionary Jewish forces in the Galilee. BLOOD flowed in the streets.
In later years, Roman pagans observed the New Year by engaging in drunken orgies—a ritual they believed constituted a personal re-enacting of the chaotic world that existed before the cosmos was ordered by the gods.
x x x
We are all in the mood for a deep breath, now. A recovery.. not from hustle and bustle, but rather more of a recovery from everything else.
525,600 minutes
525,000 moments so dear
525,600 minutes
How do you measure, measure a year?
In daylights, in sunsets, in midnights, in cups of coffee
In inches, in miles, in laughter, in strife..
We had the experiencing of all of them in am amplified way in 2020.
So here’s a cup of hope… maybe 2021 will actually be better. Maybe it will be a positive experience for humanity.
Indeed, a cup of hope for the new year.
But is that cup half full.. or half empty?
The eyes of the beholder will get a bird’s eye view in 2021.