The New Year has walked across the globe by now. Although, it is just a date, a reference mark along the way, we meet the January 1st as if it is a new beginning, a new way of life, a new hope and a new happiness which awaits just behind the next bend. Or does it?
I look around, and I am surprised how I have gotten done so many things. I cannot sometimes believe I did that because there were so many days in the last year I was not that productive. I certainly hope the New Year comes with soothing feelings of calm and adds some pleasure onto the daily menu.
Many years ago, a Latvian poet wrote some sad lines: “When the pain will stop, when it will end completely, everything else will end, as well.” Pain is a sign that we are alive. It is a signal to pay attention.
I’m not talking about physical pain only which can be so strong that nothing more exists, I’m talking about life that runs away like sand in an hourglass. Lost time, lost opportunities and lost days. So many. I will have to change that and turn every single day into enjoyable one.
Well, I am hopeful because the hope is always there: the next day will be much better, the next month will be much easier, the next year will be much nicer to me. It should be. It better be. Or otherwise what? Nothing. It’s about time I return to things that make me happy.
As a young kid I had to walk to school for quite a distance every morning. I hated mornings because I was usually reading all night, and it was extremely difficult to get up. We used to live on a high hill. As I walked, and sometimes the weather was just really nasty, I could see another hill, far away. That hill always seemed to be sunny when it was windy, cold and rainy or snowy where I was. I have no explanation for that, but the sun just loved the distant hill. I often thought: I’m going to get to this other hill. I’m going to live my life on that sunny hill. Years passed by, but the other hill remained in quite a distance. I moved to a place from another side of planet across the ocean. I left that hill there, in Latvia. I don’t even know if it is visible anymore because any landscape changes a lot over 50 years. I am still on the way to that hill. Am I any closer? Maybe. I just know I’m not on it, I haven’t reached the point where I want to be, to live, to stand, to exist yet. Will I ever? Does anybody ever have it all? The truth is: we get something and we pay a lot for it. We sometimes pay more than we ever imagined was possible.
The truth about anything that doesn’t kill us and makes us stronger is only in that regard that we know we are not giving up that easily now. Is it necessary to become stronger this way? Not at all. So much energy goes to waste which could be used for way more rewarding things, things that actually make one’s life relevant and significant.
It was sunny during the day. That might be a good sign. A sunny year? How wonderful that would be!
Wishing everybody to avoid unnecessary struggles and to reach your sunny hill whatever way you take in 2017!
Inese Poga Life School 