The New Year

I sat awhile with my feet in the sand on the first day of 2014. Funny little crabs dug holes and buried themselves alive while children danced and played games only they understood right into the Indian Ocean. White people and black people and everything in between walked up and down the beach, talking and holding hands and sometimes fighting as people seem to do too much on vacations and getaways. As the wind picked up and the sun went down, I walked back to my simple beachside guesthouse and poured a quiet glass of wine.

The first day of the year brings with it strange little thoughts and simmering hunches, and I always find it sad when people are unwilling to either look back or look forward because what’s done is done and what could happen is unpredictable. The man-made concoction of New Years Day is a delightful chance at evaluation and divination. You are where you are because of what you’ve done, and if you aren’t where you ought to be than you did something wrong or misguided and inadequate along the way. Likewise, if you want to end up anywhere in particular, you must have some foresight and direction and not show up to the theatre unprepared. This is the beauty of toasts: you clink glasses together and speak aloud about resolutions past and present and open yourself up to a little bit of truth and vulnerability. You sit and talk candidly to people about what can be changed and what could be better. I find myself loving this sort of transparency more and more as time goes by, and any chance we get to do so in a socially acceptable way does not deserve to be scoffed at by people who "hate new year's resolutions."

December flew right through elephant sanctuaries and giraffe centres and tortoise trusts, permeating out into the East Africa and melting right into the light blue sea around Zanzibar. I clinked my own glass of champagne there, and thought about the year that has come and the year that passed. 2013 is difficult to say goodbye to, futile a thing as that is to say. Years of such fullness, filled to the brim with different joys and sadness and delightful unknowns, do not come to everyone and are challenging to repeat. I reflected back on memories both simple and profound embedded deep within the cracks of New York City and Nairobi, Austin and Antigua, Doha and Seville, all coming together to form a overwhelming year in review. I thought about the thousands of miles covered by plane, train, boat, and car, and the thousands more that surely will. I wondered why some people exit our lives when we thought they would stay and others enter them unannounced. I wondered why we always drift back in our minds to the same places - far off lands with different smells and sounds and auras - when left alone to our own devices. Then a drank my glass and then another, and the newest section of life, the great unknowns and undecideds of 2014, were ushered in for better or for worse.


The faint-hearted merchant neither gains nor loses; nay he loses: one
   must take fire in order to get light.


There are a lot of things I’m not sure about these days - too many to make anyone feel particularly comfortable and enough to make one lay anxiously awake at night - but I do feel my future self from some ambiguous age saying with a little smile, “you won’t look back and wish you had settled with X, Y, or Z. You are doing just fine with everything you know. You will know a lot more soon, and I can assure you, there is just no need to worry. Now go enjoy the bright sparkling stars above Zanzibar.”