A very happy new year to everybody. May this year be full of joy, happiness and warmth, and success. May all the painful past of the previous year be forgotten, and a peaceful future be looked forward to.
Every year, I feel strangely overwhelmed on these early days. Only, this year the feeling seems much more intense and sharp. It is just that time, which flies anyway, seems to have traveled in the speed of lightning… Days seemed to have been only about fifteen hours long last year. There has been so much to do, yet I have spent so much time brooding. I have tried to patch up all incomplete works of the year in the last few days, but have obviously been badly defeated. When I look back now, scanning the days right from the early wintry days of January last year, which was not all so different from what it is right now, to the last few days of December, I realize that so much has happened during the year. So many things have changed my life from what it had been two years back, though many of the events have been pretty inconspicuous. From last year, I have started travelling alone by bus to school, and to other short distances. I can understand how much having to let me go must have worried and pained my father, so I am grateful that he did. I rejoined karate classes, and have been enjoying them much more than I did the previous time. The centre is very close to my house, the teacher is nice, and added to that my having earned the orange belt and frequent praises; the experience could have been no better.
I have strengthened the bonds with some good old friends and managed to shake off some who were not so good. I have thickened my skin much more towards what people might say to me. I have understood the value of silence, and I positively talk much less now than I used to. I have also discovered with some shock that I enjoy long periods of solitude. I say that I was rather shocked to find this because when I was younger I used to start throwing a racket even if I were left alone for a very short time! I have watched some very good movies, and read some very good books. I am very happy to say that I have managed to make a very unlikely person start reading, and she is already starting to understand the magnetic pull of a good book. This can be counted as one of my successes of 2010! I have found a few like minded people who read and think and reflect. I would love to find many, many more such people, but I guess their number will always be restricted to a few. Ah well…
I have almost completed an entire year in school without too many complaints from my teachers and classmates. Some of my closer friends have been a bit bothered about my having become quieter, but nothing can be done about that. People do change. I have also had some very new and wonderfully exciting experiences. Some have been intensely personal, and could hardly have been any better than they already have been. The others have been less reserved. The best of those experiences have undoubtedly been the starting of this blog and my joining my father’s classes. Other than that, I have had the very sweet experience of keeping a dog at home, and the very heart-breaking experience of having to part with it as well.
I have experimented with quite a few things. Some have turned out to be utter fiascos, but others have come off well enough. Others still I have tried and failed, but have decided to try and try and try again until I do succeed, one such thing being trying to talk in a single language fluently and continuously without lapsing into another. Another is improving my hand-writing, and another is reading more Bengali books and forming a strong base in my mother tongue and its age old culture and heritage.
All in all, 2010 has been a fulfilling and eventful year. It has been a year that I have been able to spend without having to feel ashamed about too many things. When I look back, I have a happy, proud feeling. And the best I can really hope for in this new year is that when, another year later, I write a similar post again, I may be able to feel even prouder and happier with myself for my activities all this year round.
