HAPPY NEW YEAR

BELATED I guess. I've missed blogging but I was just too busy being serious about my life so much so I didn't have time to enjoy it. It wasn't until a very good friend asked me why my blog isn't updated that I thought I must make time for myself and writing to all of you is what makes me happy.

How was your new year celebrations? Hope it was fun. I was busy working.

Anyway, what I'd like to share with you is the sense I had of a heavy burden shed when 2007 arrived and, I might add, I was not the only one. It was like 2006 was an awful year, one that weighed us down like a ton bricks, a year that for many whom I love have been especially hard but that sense that the new year will make things better gave cause for optimism. That left me wondering how is it that we are able to put so much trust in what is actually just another year.

Maybe this was why our forefathers and mothers -- don't forget the mothers -- felt it prudent to divide time accordingly into seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months and years. If, for those of us going through hard times, time marched on ceaselessly from sun up to sun set, with only nature making some difference, the seamlessness of life will be much too exacting. I suspect all hope would be snuffed out.

In peasant culture the seasons were important. When the rain comes they plant their padi, watch it grow and wait for the dry season to come along ripen the padi making for a harvest. In a good year the harvest festival will indeed be a joyous occasion, a time for giving thanks. In a bad year it will bring on contemplation and positive thinking as the wait begins for the next planting season. It is the breaking up of time and space into recognisable units that lends humanity the means to hope.

For, hope is the most beautiful of the survival mechanisms given to us and that is why when all hope is lost there is no longer need for life. And, it is fascinating, for me at least, how the people of Palestine, generations of them living in refugee camps with no apparent resolution of their problem in sight, and now the Iraqis, living in a perpetual state of war: HOW DO THEY GO ON? Where is the chink of light that can keep hope alive and optimism present? What is the measure of their burden?

How can I ever know when my burdens, so insipid and inconsequential by comparison, can leave me so terribly numb. What degree of numbness is afflicting them I cannot imagine. I worry that as a world we are helping in the brutalising of our fellowpersons because when one is numb there can be no feeling, not for anyone. I can imagine a numbness that can make one stop feeling for oneself even and surely when that happens there is no place in the heart for humane considerations. And try thinking what the outcome would be when that numbness is reproduced generation after generation. But, beauty still lives in the hearts of people so badly brutalised. You can see it in their art and hear it in their music. Yes, the pain is inescapbly sensed. That it adds dimension to the expressions of their soul is a boon for the arts. Yet, can we be so selfish to enjoy the fruits of their tortured souls and not want to help end the suffering?

Maybe between us we can pray for the restoration of sanity to those pretenders to leadership who would lead humanity astray. Maybe, acting as one, we can start a petition the world over to put a stop to this madness. Maybe we can help in the relief efforts. Or, maybe each and everyone of us should just decide to leave everything for a day, just one day, and converge en masse to live in their suffering, physically. When we the citizens of the world will vote with our feet maybe, just maybe, those who can stop this lunacy will listen. MAYBE?!

HAPPY 2007 ALL...