Legend

Anticipation
For all the cliche one can espouse, welcoming yet another year is conceivably, in my myopic understanding of human nature, the epitome of commonplace rhetoric. We greet the passing of one year with the joyful anticipation of the new hoping that this new and renewed opportunity would wash away the sins of the past and place an offering of a clean and new beginning. We peer into the ball to foretell a better future; we make new promises, new resolutions. We resolve to begin anew, to make this year count...

Like all other years.

But nothing truly changes. And as the fragments of time race us by in transition, we sit beneath the towers of our achievements believing we have made a change, an improvement. But nothing really changes. And the new year ends ushering another.

For those of us whose lives have forsaken the youthful naivety and optimism or have come close to meeting life at its mid-point, there is a languished jubilation, a weariness that slowly creeps toward decrepitude, decay, degeneration. Unlike the ignorance of youth, full of jouissance and hope about a boundless and limitless future, life slugs forward locking us in patterns we are seemingly unable to break free from. A new year marks the beginning of the old, an endless cyclicity that whirls toward an end - whenever that end may be.

So why do we welcome the new year with such anticipation?

Regret
When the clock struck midnight, amidst the frenetic celebration and intoxicating frenzy, high spirits, and animalistic cheers; while everyone celebrated, I teared...

I teared because I could not tell if the year ahead would be a better one. I teared because I knew time is an arbitrary construct and fortunes were blind to time. I teared because, in spite of this awareness, I wanted to believe that what was a difficult year has now ended. I teared because I turned around and saw the things I've left behind, the people I've lost, and the moments that will never be again...

In the sea of images, smells, sentiments that makes our memory, I saw a year of unsettling change, a year of struggle within and without, a year of loss. I saw the moments that have made for life itself - the anger and anguish that made me human, the spiritedness and passion that drove me to greater heights, the pride of the legacy I carved with my own hands, the fervour of nurturing those I've taken under my wing, the love of giving to those I loved, the warmth of being loved in return. I saw, accompanying the moments that have lifted me, the darkness within, the fears and insecurities of losing the people I care much for, the emotional tempests of displacement, the tumult of adapting to radical change, the conflict of accepting my own difference, and the chilling isolation and loneliness. I saw the faces of those whom I loved and still love dearly; I sensed the spectres of those I've loved and lost. I heard the whispers of love and and concern uttered to me, I listened to the words I did not say, or wish I had. I felt the sting of betrayal, I gathered strength from the loyalty of friends. I loved deeply, I lost immensely.

I peered with such hindsight clarity these moments that marked a milestone transition in my life. I saw what I had left behind. And I ask why...

And as I gaze into the void that is the future, I recognise that there perhaps is no answer. There never was. Standing in between history written and unwritten, I recognise, painfully, that I, like the rest of humanity, am a creature of regret. As much as one tries never to regret the decisions one undertakes in life, there is always already regret. It is the the pervasive consequence of choice and free will. Yet regret is necessary for it is when we recognise what was and could have been can we rise to try again, can we learn to love again and recover what will be lost. It is with regret that we come to cherish the here-and-now. With regret, in knowing that something is lost and would never again return, we are humbled by our humanity: we never truly appreciate what we've got till we've lost it.

Regret can only come with loss...

Impermanence
To live life fully is to then embrace the present and learn to let go of the past. Yet it is not about discarding history or memory. Rather, it is perceiving memory for all that it's worth, realising that what was will never be again and what is will be. Change is the only constant and impermanence the only permanence. The tides never hit the shores at the same shoreline, the moon is consistently inconstant, the days never repeat themselves. Inherent in time is change: growth is the ivory of change, decay the ebony.

Yet we seek permanence. We build monuments of greatness to challenge growth and decay, we construct edifices of civilisation to hold time in concrete and steel, we erect statues to defy death, to immortalise the embodiment of decay - our bodies, flesh and blood.

But eventually change and impermanence will triumph and all we can do is to stand in the desert of change wondering why. The wondering/wandering brings pain, immeasurable pain, for we always hope that things would last, we desire permanence. That the people beside us would always be there, that love would be eternal. But it rarely is... It is one of life's most difficult lessons I've had to learn time and again, yet I seem to be the poorest student of this most simplest tenet in life.

Acceptance
And so there is only acceptance; there can only be acceptance. In acceptance, we live the moment, appreciating the past and anticipating the future.

Remembrance
In the end, it is only in re-telling the tale to ourselves time and again that we can remember. Eternity is found not in time but in memory (yet memory is that which we should come to distrust the most for we keep in mind only the moments we so choose). The moments and people we love live on in eternity only in memory. And with each time we recall, we resurrect their presence, re-live the moments and all of that which make them spectres of one's life.

But even memory fades and as we try to grasp these memories, the grains of remembrance slide through the gaps and fissures of a tightening grip. And so our lives are a constant struggle of memory against forgetting... For when we forget, when we are stricken with amnesia, we murder those we love, we forget ourselves. That is why people who suffer from clinical amnesia or Alzheimer's are the living dead for they can no longer recall, they can no longer remember. They can no longer love for there is no past to love...

Remember, remember: this is the infinitesimal quest of humanity.

Epilogue
As I stand here at the threshold of change, at the crossroads of a life I once knew and a life uncertain to become, I bear nostalgia on my back with anticipation paved before me. As I feel the weight of nostalgia bearing down, I turn around to see regret and loss. But this burden needs to be set down. And I begin to set it down with deepest apologies to those that I have left behind, to those that I now leave behind - and these are ones whom I have once loved as dearly as life itself. I wish it could be otherwise, I wish I could believe in eternity and a happy-ever-after. But I can't for reality is brutish, harsh, and unforgiving. This is how it can only be. This is how it must be. For circumstance has forced my hands to close the door behind me. And so I enter a new room.

History proceeds and our histories, once intertwined, once collective, will no longer be for in the end every story is singular.

Afterthought
In the here and now, between yesterday and tomorrow, I recognise with such illuminating clarity, that, unlike what others have made me out to be, I am no legend, I am no hero, I am human...

Happy New Year...