Goodbye 2019, Hello 2020(s)!!
I woke up this morning to the sound of ‘Another one bites the dust’ by Queen. The song wasn’t actually playing, but I could hear the tune in the back of my head, reminding me that I have, once again, come to the end of the year. This time around, however, it is not just the year that is ending, but also the decade. The last time a decade ended, it wasn’t a big deal to me — certainly, I wasn’t old enough to care. In some ways, I still don’t, but as arbitrary as these things are, they do have some significance. Beginnings and endings give us a chance to take stock of what we have done, how far we have come and also to set a course for the future. The end is only the beginning, and every finish line is the beginning of a new race.
First and foremost, we must acknowledge how amazing is it that we are all alive and able to experience the end of another year and decade. I belong to that somewhat elite group of people who have lived in 2 different millennia and centuries as well as 3 decades but are still under 30 years of age. In fact, I am about to enter my fourth decade despite being nowhere close to 30. It’s important to show gratitude because over the last year and the last decade, countless lives have been lost. I think it is safe to say that, unless you care about absolutely no one else but yourself, if you are reading this, then you have definitely lost someone that was close to you during this time period. It is so easy to take life for granted — we act as if existence is owed to us, but it isn’t. It is a horrible reality to live with, but every breath we take could be the last and that’s a fact. In the same way that we have goals and dreams and plans for our lives, so did almost all the people who did not manage to make it to this point. It is important for us to take a moment, it doesn’t have to be every day, but it’s best if it is, to express our gratitude, not just because we are alive, but also because those we love and care about are also alive. When you stop to really consider how fragile life is, you start to value it more. Those things that you would otherwise make a big deal of start to look very trivial. When someone cuts you off on the road, you start to think ‘oh thank goodness he didn’t actually crash into me,’ instead of exploding into a fit of rage and dwelling upon that anger all day. The point is that, if you’re healthy today, be grateful. If you’re not, be grateful too; at least you are alive because, as long as you are alive, you can get better. Be grateful for the people around you — those who love and cherish you. For those who are estranged, never hesitate to try and mend those bridges, you never know if tomorrow that person will still be around for you to fix those broken ties. What I won’t say, though, is that you should be grateful because someone out there has it worse because, though that may be true, no one can take away the significance of your subjective experience. Gratitude simply comes from focusing more on what you have than what you don’t have. What we have is life. Every day is the chance to rewrite our story and change our narrative. The dead don’t have that. Their life story is set in stone. Be grateful for that.
As arbitrary as the concept of the year and the decade is, it still has its usefulness. The truth is that we are all going to wake up tomorrow and the only thing that will be different will be the numbers on the calendar. In reality, it doesn’t necessarily take a new year or a new decade to change us. We change every day. Regardless, we all probably started this decade and this year with targets and goals. I did too. I had certain things that I promised myself I would achieve by the end of 2019. I achieved some of them, and I abandoned some of them along the way. For the ones I abandoned, it was not because I failed, but because I, like every other human being, am dynamic. Our needs and wants change constantly, and as such, we must be careful to not make ourselves slaves to our goals. Never hesitate to pivot when you realize that your goals are taking you in the wrong direction. Treat your goals more like guidelines to give you a general sense of direction in life, but be flexible. Putting a deadline on your goal is always the best thing to do, but when you fail to reach your targets in the desired time frame, don’t fret and certainly don’t throw them away. Sometimes we overestimate our abilities and sometimes we encounter obstacles that force us to take the long way around on the path towards our destinies. A degree obtained in 6 years is still as useful as one obtained in 4 years, and if you intended to lose 20 kgs by the end of this year but failed to reach that target, reaching it next year will not diminish its significance. Set your goals, but don’t be beholden to them. Let them be your guide, but do not be a slave to them. Most importantly, your goals and targets must be your own. Succumbing to social pressure will only serve to alienate you from yourself. Don’t let anyone tell you what you should and should not be striving towards. Another important thing is to not treat our goals as if they are ends in themselves. We must treat our goals more like milestones than finish lines. When you achieve your goal, whether it’s to start a company, to publish a book or to buy a house, whatever it is, don’t think that is the end, because it isn’t. If you think reaching your goals will bring you happiness or joy everlasting, then you may be sorely disappointed. In many cases, such as some of the examples I gave above, reaching that goal is only the beginning. When you reach your targets, stop to celebrate them, but remember that euphoric feeling will not last forever. Someone once told me that being happy is simply a state, just like being hungry. When the conditions are right for you to feel happy, you will be happy, but just like that stuffed up feeling you get after a massive meal, it does not last forever. It is important to remember that.
When I was 10, 18 seemed like a lifetime away. Now I am past 20, and 18 is in my rear-view mirror. I look back sometimes, only to see how far I have come. All over social media, I see people posting images showing their transformations between now and the beginning of the decade. So many people have come so far, and so have I. It’s funny how quickly a decade can fly by. Such is the paradoxical nature of life. It is both short and long. Picture yourself 10 years from now — certainly, that feels like an eternity away, and yet it might as well be just around the corner. Imagine you wanted to start a project, and then found out that you will only start to see real progress in 5 years. You might be inclined to not do it; after all, that is so far away, but each passing day, week and month brings you closer to that day, and you may find that 5 years can pass by so quickly that you will end up regretting not taking the opportunity. The point I am trying to make is that no matter what we do, life passes by. We try so hard to not let life pass us by, but it does. If we are locked into a mechanical routine, especially, days, weeks and months will breeze by so quickly that we will barely notice. The worst past is that, at the end, we might look back and discover that we did nothing significant. So many of us are locked into a utilitarian view of life, i.e. ‘everything you do must have a purpose’. We go to school to get a job, then get a job to make money to buy the things we want. How can we allow the things we spend most of our time on to be things we are doing just because we have to? When was the last time you stopped to smell the roses? Or to pet a cat on the street? When was the last time you did nothing for no reason? We often think we are doing nothing, but the truth is between work or school or whatever it is we do to keep us busy, the time we spend socializing, or scrolling through social media or reading, is not time spent doing nothing. We do these things to rest or to blow off steam. Everything we do, we do for a reason. That, then, becomes the problem with our existence. There’s always something to strive towards — a goal to reach — when do we stop to actually live our lives? Live your life. No matter how busy you are, take time out of every day to do something that you love, just for the sake of it. Make sure it is untainted by the desire to get better, or to distract yourself from the humdrum of life — keep it pure. An example of something of this nature is meditation. Taking the time out of every day to just sit in silence and observe one’s own thoughts and feelings is precisely the thing that we lack in our lives, but even this has been tainted in some ways by goals and expectations. People meditate now because meditation has been touted as some new age cure for depression and anxiety or whatever. It’s no longer just sitting quietly doing nothing. People now expect results. So, if it’s reading you love, then you don’t always have to read meaningful books — read a trashy fiction novel once in a while, sit on your bed and listen to music, take a walk outside with no destination in mind, sit with someone you love and just talk, play football with no goal posts, write a story that you don’t intend to finish. Life is short, but we can still make the most of it.
If what it takes for you to leave your past behind is a change in the calendar, then, by all means, when the clock strikes 12 tonight, let it usher in a new dawn for you. We carry with us so much baggage that does nothing but weigh us down, and then we wonder why we are so unhappy. Sometimes, I have moments where I have flashbacks of painful or embarrassing moments from 5 or 6 years ago. I am well aware that those moments are long gone and forgotten, especially in the minds of the people who also witnessed them, and I am even more aware of how some of them have shaped who I am today (in a positive way), and yet, just by recalling them, I find myself reliving those terrible experiences all over again. For many of us, this is the reality that we have to live with. We are haunted by ghosts from our past, allowing our former lovers, classmates and workmates and even people we did not even know, to rule over our lives. We hurt the people who care about us today because somebody else hurt us yesterday. That is no way to live. We don’t have to wait until the end of the year to ditch our baggage. Sometimes we can do it over night, by simply letting go. Let go of the past, make space for the future. At the end of the day, all that we have is each moment. The past is in the past, we can learn from it, but beyond that, we must not give it power to rule over our present. The future may be full of possibility, but it is not guaranteed. See the future, but do not neglect the present. Most importantly, however, let the past go. Really, just let it go.
Going forward, it is important to note that everything and everyone around us is of the nature to change. The people we know and love grow and evolve, and it is unfair of us to keep holding onto the picture of them from years past. Knowing this will allow us to reacquaint ourselves with them every time we meet, instead of automatically assuming that they still have the same interests and habits. The key is to constantly reacquaint ourselves with each other. This also applies to our circumstances. Nothing is permanent. The one constant in life is that everything changes. You will not be in the same job forever, you may not live in the same house forever, and you might not have the same friends forever. Such change is scary, but it’s inevitable. Don’t fight it. Embrace it. Go with it. Accept it.
Another thing to recognize is that there are no good and bad experiences. Such a realization will help us to not jump to conclusions based on whatever we experience. Some things will make us happy, and some things will make us sad, but in the end, we have no idea in what direction they are taking us. I have known people who went through painful break-ups but went on the find better people whom they would have never gotten to meet had they stayed in their relationships. Over the last decade, I experienced painful rejections and I made plans that did not pan out, and yet in most of the cases, I found the outcome to be even better than what I had originally wanted or expected. Obviously, we should not paint an overly optimistic picture that makes it seem like whenever things don’t go according to plan it’s for the best. Sometimes things go completely off-track and we find ourselves in a terrible situation that we can’t find our way out of. We can’t just brush over that reality. What is important, however, is to ensure that when anything happens, we resist the urge to assign a value to them; as in, “this is a good thing” or “this is a bad thing”. Everything just is. We all know that we cannot know the future, and as such, how can we know if the outcome of any particular event will be good or bad? The truth is that we can’t. So, don’t judge.
As we set off on this new voyage that is the 2020s, we must first stop and evaluate ourselves. Who are we, really? Why do we love what we love? Ask yourself the difficult questions. Why are we doing what we are doing? Why do we value the things we value? Why do we believe the things that we believe? Do not allow yourself to rush into answering these questions. Undoubtedly, some of the answers will scare you and some of them will be unsettling, but it’s the only way to put yourself on a path towards living authentically. Let that be your guide as you set your new targets. Be honest with yourself, that is of utmost importance. Do not overestimate your own abilities, but at the same time, do not underestimate yourself or sell yourself short. As is the norm with life, there will be twists and there will be turns. Brace yourself for them. Make your plans for the future, but expect things to not go according to plan, and stay ready to make adjustments when needed.
As always, these are just my thoughts. They are always open to discussion if anyone disagrees or wants clarification or to improve upon them. If you think this article may appeal to someone you know, don’t hesitate to share it, too.
Lastly, I just want to wish you all a happy new year, and a more than prosperous 2020 filled with love and joy and happiness in abundance! Thank you for taking the time to read this, and I assure you that I will be back next year with more content!
