Just been reading over last year's New Year's Eve blog. The gist of it was that if we all spent a bit more time being kind and looking out for one another in 2020, nothing could go that wrong for us!
Obviously the gods of fortune mustn't be avid readers - as being kind or looking-out-for-one-another certainly wasn't on their things to do list this year! Perhaps sending us a strongly-worded letter advising us all to concentrate on other things, maybe on repairing the world we've set in flames was more on their minds.
Or, maybe, they were just pointing out that no matter how presumptuous we get about our 'infallibility' as a species, they will always be there, hangin' round our works with their spanners at the ready.
On reflection, as I was writing that piece, I think we could all sense that something was amiss in the world - the news from Wuhan, a place I'd never heard of 'til then, was becoming more and more ominous. But even so, at the time, few of us could've predicted where it was all leading.
Certainly, little did we expect that, in the space of a few months, all hope would be dry-coughed out of Pandora's Box and all the replacement bread-baking and road-running and diary-keeping and bird-watching and Zoom-calling that social-distancing required of us, wouldn't be coaxing it back in a hurry!
Most of all though, little did we know how being denied the sensation of human touch would come with the callous side effect of breaking the human heart.
For many it was bad, but for many more it was unthinkably worse - yet all of us are scarred by it. And as a result, nothing can really return to what it was before, no matter what happens in the year ahead.
Still, it is the human way to use our past experiences to forge our vision of the future. And that bridge between the two is what normally forms the basis for our hopes.
But I wonder tonight, on this New Year's Eve, if the opposite is really what we should be wishing for in 2021? I wonder should we all hope that 'what the future brings' will be the very thing that leads us back, not necessarily to our past, but to our essence and to the things we've lost?
So, here's praying that hope will spring eternal this coming year and with a leaping enthusiasm that comes with knobs on! And, that we'll all see again what Emily Dickinson once saw. That ...
More soon ...
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| Onwards and upwards, me hearties! |
