The New Year and Beyond

Finally, I can tell people who ask that I'll be going to college next year, rather than the clunky phrase 'the year after next, viz. 2007,' which requires some explanation. I'm glad to leave 2005, with all its trials, tribulations, and griefs behind, and to look forward to what lies ahead. Most people maintain their sanity, after all, by putting their lot in what is to come, rather than what has already passed, because we are helpless to change the latter while the former at least offers us the illusion that we have some degree of control over it.

In all honesty, I don't know what I want to do with this year. One year's service in the army is over and at the rate things are going, the remaining year shall be over without too much effort. Most of my good-intentioned resolutions for the new year that I made at the beginning of last year have gone unfulfilled: it's hard to find the discipline to accomplish them, and for all the excuses that I might muster, they all eventually fail to assail the fact that it is my own shortcoming that has thwarted them. This year I shall not make resolutions that I cannot keep, nor promises that I cannot honour, because promises broken to oneself diminishes one's standing in one's own eyes, rather than that of others, a far more biting diminution. My fate is not in my own hands, this I accept. Yet it would be perverse to use that to justify idle inaction. As before, I shall strive, though fraught with inadequacy and error, to do what is right, and to better the happiness that is mine and others'. That alone will require a substantial portion of my energies. The highest commendation I can imagine is that it will be energy well spent, and not squandered.

Here's to a happy new year, a blessed one, and a fulfilling one for all. I promise my next update will be less sentimental: this promise I am unlikely to break.