HAPPY NEW YEAR!

As the crackers burst and festivities abound and a new year beckons glad tidings to all, the mind reverts to old times when those that have left us were with us to share this moment of a fresh awaking to the newness of life. The midnight hour ushers us into a new beginning and bids farewell to the last lingering moments of the bygone year. It is this junction which is the transit point for the past into the future that constitutes this moment called the present, never enduring, yet, encompassing in its ephemeral embrace all our phenomenal dreams, our experience of life, that is.

The human mind conjures peculiar fancies for itself and one such is the hypnosis of numbers. When all of humanity decides to feel happy at a fixed point of time, there is concurrence of mental forces and the resulting abounding joy, however fleeting, felt in the moment. Such an occasion is the New Year when for a brief while the inner joy of the soul surfaces through the rough exterior of a jarring episode called the past year, when a flash of light streaks across the sky like an undying hope in the firmament of human aspiration, when the past is set aside as so much of mystifying misery and a new advance striven for to further the cause of a brighter morrow. Resolutions galore on inconstant minds make their stellar appearances but for a forgettable flicker and the past rolls on with its inertia for yet another orbit round the sun. The problems keep mounting as demographic demands mount and the misery of the masses sees no alleviation. The globe keeps warming up as human relations chill. A flash-point hither and a fissure of sorts thither keep peace on tenterhooks as the world inexorably seems to slide down into the ambit of a cataclysmic conflict that could consume human civilisation for good. Through all this the new year breaks through with its message of hope and joy and beckons us to celebrate the bliss beneath the sorrowful surface of things. And herein lies the hope. The spirit of man, battered and bashed but never quite utterly vanquished, battles on to bring forth victory. In this unfailing strength of the soul is coiled the course of our future evolution and our final flip to freedom.

A very happy new year to everybody!