reflection

This year is a year of writing and reading. It is a year of study and a year in which I will finally try to escape the corporate rat race. It is a year to be brave and to embrace poverty in the pursuit of being true to one’s self; a year to stop sacrificing my time, my life, to those who are making a lot of money and who shuffle me around like I am a pawn on their chessboard. It’s time to find a literary agent and to find out the truth once and for all about my writing. I’m poor and I have no traditional ambitions. My old car and my rented home and my lonely life make me a failure in the eyes of most but I have always set out to be a humble man with a desire to write and that is what I do. I make absolutely no money from writing but I do it anyway. I do not enhance my career through my studies and yet this year will be the year I embark upon the daunting English Masters Degree. It’s a year, however, to remain on the edges of traditions, scavenging what I can to keep me happy when I need it. It’s a year to stop spending so much time and energy on those who bring out the worst in me. Around certain people I am my true self. Around others I am miserable.

A new year is, of course, a way of psychologically sweeping out the debris and trying to reconstruct positively and yet the scientific fact is that it is simply another day. There is no purpose for us; we are a brief flicker in evolutionary biology; a species here due to a random series of events and we are nothing more than a species sharing this planet with so many other species. We have killed off a few of those species and we have brutally tortured our own along the way. We have invented numerous Gods and still worship many of them to this day. We are a species rife for extinction and yet, somehow, our ability to think has caused us to believe that we are immortal in some form or another. The best that we can do whilst we are here is to try to find meaning. People have various methods of finding meaning, of course; some get married and have children, others accumulate material wealth and power over others and then there are those who find meaning in art, literature, film, nature and so on.

2012 was a good year in that I travelled to America and to South Africa... and had a brilliant time in both of those places. The American holiday was one of the best I have ever had and really tied a lot of things together for me. I also had many fun times here in England and forged some interesting bonds with fascinating people. The year was also filled with the constant struggles that I have known throughout my life; those of the mind... those of fighting off my own inner demons.

So, happy new year. May you realise that you don’t need wealth or power or domination over others and that you don’t need to accumulate material goods. May you find meaning in experiencing your own mind, the environment, nature, literature, art, and being kind to others.