What is celebrated with the passing of a year, other than the possibility of a new chance, is the resilience of memory. We look forward to a new year with a vow to remember the previous ones, the past mistakes and victories and the unusual joy in committing them.
We celebrate a new year with a toast for the previous ones: there are no regrets. The scary thing about adulthood is that we must own up to our own mistakes, our flaws. Strangely, that’s also the liberating part of it. A life without any error is a life spent without love. What we are passionate about is bound to push us to make mistakes, the moral lesson of chasing our dreams. A poet said that a shard of glass thrown into the ocean would certainly come out changed, its clear and shiny skin smoothened and dulled by the rough edges of the sand: a piece of glass becoming the ocean itself.
2007 wasn’t such a bad year. Here’s to the remembrance of a year of deep frustrations that taught us in Akbayan the miraculous art of climbing higher. Here’s to a cat that stayed with us for just a year, who was fiercely sovereign but endured lessons on how to speak in Portuguese and how enunciate English verbs that start with the letter E. Here’s to Here’s to the great love that has eluded (some of) us, may we catch it finally this year. And here to 2007, the year I finally learned how to say no (and no, actually, means no), even to a movement that has always been the source of my passion. The sky didn’t collapse, there are no regrets.
May the new year be as meaningful.
xfullman 