Saturday 1 January 2011

2011 ?.... is that relaly you ?

As we all threw 2010 into the trash, what was that cowering under the sofa ? Shivering with shyness ? Well, 2011 of course, our new year.

Come on '11, out you come, there's no need to be coy. Enticing it, as we do with a nice and pleasant tone, and some breadcrumbs.


The interesting thing, of course, or not, depending on your view is that all this celebration is about the marking of a date, that is entirely given significance, with human invention. How we do like to mark out our lives with these signposts or landmarks. We divide it up, shouting for joy at the clocking up of another number.

Isn't that really much ado about nothing ? Like the day of your birthday, when people share with you their best wishes on the notching up of another year. 'Congratulations' they say. Pleasant as it naturally is, the alternative - of not getting any older, by dying - isn't really something that people would contemplate. Always make me think it's like congratulating someone for breathing properly.

And when you mark that inevitable passing of another year in your life, does one day feel any different from the last. No. Not one jot. How does the food in my cupboard know that at midnight is suddenly becomes inedible ? Will those cheese and onion snacks suddenly be more dangerous to my health ten minutes past midnight ?

Time is such a strange thing. It surely passes, without a care at all for it's going, or how we measure it. Marching as it does inexorably on. Well, this year, I'm going to be marking the passing of the time by making a blog entry every day. Some of them will probably not contain very much at all. Some will inevitably be 'fillers'. Even so even if I achieve half this target, I'd have made considerably more entries than 2010. I am hoping that somewhere in the mix of 'fillers' and droll, boredom that is really the vast majority of the content of most of anyone's life I will be recording what happens to me, how I feel. There have been some very unexpected things in 2010, and I am counting on 2011 being the same. No one can predict the extraordinary things that are in the future. The ordinary things (wanting to stay in bed longer every morning, dealing with the roller-coaster of challenge, achievement and self motivation that is work, the incomplete works that I attempt in feeble acts of creativity....) will be there too. Even if one person gets something out of all that, it will be a success.

What I'm hoping, is that the one person, as a minimum that gets something out of that, is me.

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