The last days of the year are usually those that makes us think the most about our own lives and the paths we’ve chosen to follow. Well, at least they are for me.
For many years now, I also go along with the mindset and make sure to review what happened in the past year as well as to hope for the next. Essentially, I look into the exact eve one year before and which of the things I thought and felt I managed to carry with me throughout the three hundred and sixty four days that followed. I put life in a nutshell and I look it through.
Well, today is not different so the revision begins. Last time it was new years eve, I was in a different continent, with different traditions, people and climate, and our hearts were filled with other feelings. We felt complete in many ways and empty in others, but there was a sort of balance in between that gave meaning to things. We enjoyed the midnight kiss with our heart full and trusting, and the sum was enough to hope for a better year.
Lessons is all we’ve gotten since then. We learned about our true past and our fate, but mostly about ourselves and the person we wish to become, as well as the world around us. There is a new awareness in our days which has opened our eyes to what our past has done to us and to what to expect from the upcoming calendar. Either way, I believe that the best lesson -and perhaps the most important one- is the one that feels unnatural de most and that I was perhaps never ready to learn: I am all alone.
I come from a place where being alone isn’t a part of life, neither a natural choice nor a healthy thing. We’ve always learned that being alone only brings you bad thoughts and a heart fill up with sadness. Whenever one said that solitude was a choice, there was a certain belief of madness and a persistent desire to become a company, reassuring that “you are not alone!”. Well, this all changed this year.
Personally, I never liked to be alone. I have, of course, experienced loneliness but never with a permanent hold of it. It was often waiting for something or someone which was certain to come. Being alone was a temporary thought and time which had never come to stay. The perception of loneliness was scary and negative and I always tried to avoid it, until I realised that am alone, no matter how many people I have next to me. I have learned about loneliness this year in a very unexpected way and no matter how many people I know, I am all by myself. This year, I watched them all go, one after the other. People who moved abroad or who simply chose to look to the other way. It came to me like a punch in the face and it is teaching me something that I wish to carry with me throughout the new year.
So now, after loads of sobbing and whining, it all came to this: being alone doesn’t mean to be unhappy, but to trust in your own guts. Nobody to give you advice, nobody to hold your hand, no one as your emergency contact. Less fucks given to all of that, more belief in your own inner-power and consciousness. I don’t know how much of me already believes in it, but it has certainly become my new years resolution. You come to this world as a cub and you need to learn how to face the jungle, so become the hunter and feed yourself. It is a scary time, but it is a new time.
As much as we know that tomorrow is just another day, the feelings of end and restart renews energies and makes us believe that it is all fresh again. And for that and for much (much) more, I am embracing myself, acknowledging my loneliness and starting a pursuit for what is real, tangible and true: it is the awareness and the inner power that I know lives within me.
Happy new year!
