Maria wrote
about Seamus Heaney’s
advice and I borrow here:
“Getting started, keeping going, getting
started again — in art and in life, it seems to me this is the essential rhythm
not only of achievement but of survival, the ground of convinced action, the
basis of self-esteem and the guarantee of credibility in your lives,
credibility to yourselves as well as to others.
{…} —
because unless that underground level of the self is preserved as a verified
and verifying element in your make-up, you are going to be in danger of
settling into whatever profile the world prepares for you and accepting
whatever profile the world provides for you. You’ll be in danger of molding
yourselves in accordance with laws of growth other than those of your own
intuitive being.
{…} The
true and durable path into and through experience involves being true to the
actual givens of your lives. True to your own solitude, true to your own secret
knowledge. Because oddly enough, it is that intimate, deeply personal knowledge
that links us most vitally and keeps us most reliably connected to one another”
What
happens when you ride the depth of despair only to float back up weightlessly?
What
happens when you flirt with nihilistic despondency only to take a beat and romance
the thrilling buoyancy?
What
happens when the mind gets enmeshed in a loop of tendentious self-sabotage only
to take a deep breath and be en-souled in a hum of quiet serenity?
All
yours, springing from within, completely divorced from outside?
For
one, it becomes a life without a dull moment; even the continued solitude is
froth with happenings.
Happenings
that are painful, that makes you bleed, that attacks your reveries of
prosaicness with feral elongated silences, with supernova implosions.
There
is no static self. Even your cells you were are born with, are replaced. Your
environments change, your living conditions change. Yet you remain montage of
your various selves pieced together bit by tiny bit over the course of a
lifetime – reconfiguring your realities, continuously normalizing the equations
of your here and now.
The
more elements and variables of pain and strife, pleasure and joy, righteousness
and morals, kindness and darkness, learning and mistakes – you parse, the more
living the montage.
You
come undone, you rebuild, you live on, you remake, and you evolve.
The
continued transfiguration –more of it; sharply in focus; an arduous event
horizon - definition of this year.
Almost
8760 tenacious hours have been put in to hone the skills. Now is the time to
glide through the ballet of next 8784.
Happy
2020 Leap to all of you!
Copyright
© Neerja Yadav