2024: A (small) Belief

Looking forward to every new year is an endeavor of tedium. You're expected to be filled with a pep in your step and hope for good tidings in the impending months. But there's no certainty that a year will be good for you: you only can hope for it to be so.

And once the year passes to unfold into another, in retrospect you commence to ponder at the wounds that time has wrought upon you - for better or worse - and the dignity behind their pain. If you've read a little Dostoevsky, you'll know that we yearningly seek suffering as pleasure; it is of our own secret demi-monde characteristics to want a little suffering in our lives. It beautifies, purifies, causes one's ascension from life to a realm of profound and universal understanding. But, as with all forms of human perception aspiring to knowledge, such elements can be faulty. For we solely rely upon a singular and subjective consciousness to determine the politics of self-actualization. However, we focus on not only the tremors of existence but also on little notes of happiness experienced in the year that trickled by. The meaning of happiness is deepened by the depth of sadness that has surrounded it.

Life occurs in proportions of all emotions in fluid amalgamation: that's what composes an entire year in our world. I've seen reflective video essays coming up on my search suggestions in YouTube (despite it already being a little over two weeks into the new year) because our thinking on the implications of the past is the tool we possess to start hoping for better things to happen.

Why do I write this blog? you may ask. Is it to raise readership? To practice the skill of communicating ideas in a relatable, unfragmented manner? To put my opinions out there amidst the internet where too many things are happening (yet which somehow ends up looking like a ghost town)? As my response, and also in turn, allow me to inquire a little further: why do you perform certain activities in your life? I have friends who play the guitar, make short videos to post on social media, host podcasts, draw fanart, play golf: the apparent purpose to all these is evidenced to produce pleasure and relaxation. These activities then become ritualistic, owing to the sense of fulfilment they provide. At the rudimentary level, they occupy the position of good hobbies. If you'd like to peruse this a little deeper, you might think that such hobbies give us purpose in our very lives. Things that we keep coming back to help us live in silent and oft indiscernible ways. We may not readily perceive the impact they actuate on us, but it's an act of self-elevation.

I believe in persistence, if nothing else. That's why I write. That's why we do the things that we do, and hope that the new year goes smoothly. I won't rattle out an antiquated truism like 'Change is the only constant' here, but I will for certainty say that every year doesn't have to seem like the same. It doesn't have to simulate the repeated windings of an hourglass, sand seeping through the miniscule convex blindly. We might not be aware of it, but life does more than simply happen to all of us. Holding on single-mindedly to certain hopes in our lives transforms and preserves. Even if it's just my (excessively) slow reading of A Farewell to Arms.

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