Farewell to a year untold
I read a lot. I forget a lot too. My friend, Vivek, often asks me how come I remember all the trivia that I share with him almost on a…
I read a lot. I forget a lot too. My friend, Vivek, often asks me how come I remember all the trivia that I share with him almost on a daily basis. If only he knew how little of the vessel is left for him to drink from. There is so much more and yet there is so much less to share. Most of the stuff I bother to study online disappears into thin air very soon. My memory isn’t very sharp when it comes to recent events but I vividly remember what happened back in 1991. A strange paradox, if you may. Anyway, to cut my losses and arrest whatever precious I could hold back in my mind, I note down something or the other whenever I can. Writing (read: typing) down helps me recollect remnants of the bigger story.
We can’t have everything in life, now, can we?
Which brings us to the protagonist of this blog post: 2018. Doesn’t it feel like the year passed by in a hurry? Just last week, it was January and we were struggling with our New Year resolutions and here we are tethering on the dying ends of a year that can’t wait to abandon us. If you ask around, you’ll get the verdict in 4 categories — good, bad, great and worst. There is no other category available in the 21st century. Either a year is so good that you want it to stay the way it is right in to the next year as well or it’s so bad that you want the following year to change its screenplay. Or it’s a choice between being so great that you don’t give a damn anymore and being so worst that that you want to be woken up only on 1st Jan.
Why is this so?
For starters, our collective memory is often binary in nature, completely devoid of nuance. We remember what bothers to affect us deeply. Very rarely do we go through a storm and know exactly how to deal with it. Similarly, seldom do we know how to deal with happiness, without becoming addicted to it. This peculiar behavior leaves us wanting for more and thus stranded in a perpetual state of neediness. No year is generous enough for us; it can always get better.
Granted complacency breeds complacency, we aren’t aware of the way out of this maze. And we human beings won’t let the cold hands of fate touch their so-called plans of getting more than they bargained for. In the end, questions trump the answers and we are struggling with the greatest question of all: What is going to happen next?