Meditation for the Closing Year

This year is about to close. The usual wont in media or even in personal journals, for that matter, during this time of the year is giving a year-end report of the year that was. That is the usual practice. During this time when the date of the year changes and progresses into a different one, everybody is afflicted by the epidemic of nostalgia. This is the time when one looks back at the closing year with an audible exhalation the same way when one finishes a nice, good book.

Yet, no matter how bad the year that was, when one succumbs to the temptation of backtracking through time and recalling the past year, one always miraculously finds the year as bearable and somehow has brought happy moments to him. There may be some events that we can call undesirable to the memory but these, too, have somehow lost their pain or undesirability because time has already healed the wounds they have caused the person. The year that was then, on a general personal level, is something worthy to look back at.

The question as to why is this so? Why when we recall the year that was or even the previous years, even if those years were tough, we cherish it as something special to recall and remember at. If one remembers even the hardest experience he suffered in the past, he would think of it with a smile in his lips.

The answer to the question is the simple reason that one has able to hurdle passed the challenges and hassles that came his way. The person has already endured the pain and suffering of life. And the capacity to look back at those moments of dire straits means success in strengthening one’s soul. So the recollection is a remembering of sweet pain that brought a lot of lessons in life, about life, about being human.

If we borrow Nietzsche’s words: If it doesn’t kill you it can only make your stronger. Indeed, the blows and beatings that a person receives can only make him stronger in due time. And this time almost always comes when the year ends for the reason that this is the time when a person stops for a moment to examine the days that have gone. He stops regular routine to watch the vista of the invisible passing of time; the completion of one revolution of planet earth around the sun. This is the time when everything that happened yesterday down to the twelfth month will be reviewed by nostalgic eyes and a heart that throbs purely of fluid serenity.

There is then, as I mentioned in the aspect of personal level, no such bad previous year. Or if we go a little further, no bad past per se. Those bad events in our past are what makes us stronger; strengthens our souls.

Yes, strengthens our souls.