Celebration

It's the new year - the 'Oriental' version that is.

Many are speculating about the outcome of the new year - with the unpredictability and frivolity of the Monkey looming over threatening to bring pain and pleasure, joy and mischief.

But what does it mean for us to celebrate a new year? How have we grown as a person? Those are the questions that have been haunting me. Regardless of the externalities that can possibly shape, contort, distort and cause distraught in many ways, how do we withstand these moulding pressures?

It's a year closer to departing 'youth', as I was sharing with my dearest friend Angie. There is an uncertainty and a prevailing melancholy especially at a point in my life where I feel confident of myself, assured of my own person, my thoughts, my perceptions - my difference. There is much that I want to do with that youthful vigour and energy but time is running out. Like sand running down the hourglass, I watch myself age physically and yet feel mentally empowered. I speak as though I were past 50 but I guess I finally understand what my favourite poet W.B. Yeats once felt - the conflict and contestation within; the fear of ageing, the tussle between an active memory and a frail body.

I finally understand, as well, the age old saying "Youth is wasted on the young". If only the young could comprehend the immense power they yield and the limitless potential and possibilities that lay before them ... I look at my kids and I wish I had the opportunities they now have. Do I wish I were 18 now? At times I do, at others I do not. Ironically, if my kids possessed the meta-capacity to take a third-person perspective on their own lives and had the maturity to reflect on their own actions, they would not be 'youth'. That is perhaps the greatest irony of being young. It is appreciated only when one no longer is young - like all things ... cherished only after it is gone.

To the one I love and who is no longer ... Happy new year. I wish you the very best that life can offer. And I know life will offer you much. God bless ...