For many people, sometimes including myself, the new year means many things - resolutions, retrospection, keeping ambitions and lives in check, a bank account still limping from a torrentous christmas spree, a minimum 1 month detox to work off all that NYE substance abuse, prayer, gym, and the like. Statistically more relationships end in the first month of the year than any other period. Also in the same period is the highest number of bankrupcy declarations in the UK. Train and tube fairs go up, people join and drop out of school, and the tiny boutique owner on King's Road decides that maybe the animal print rug wasn't the best choice after all.
Who could blame them all? The new year is after all a time to evaluate. To look ahead and to look behind and adjust your path in whatever walk of life you may be.
I landed on the 30th of December in Madrid just as a huge bomb gutted a significant portion of terminal 4 of Barajas Airport.
After the painful wait for customs officers to show up and after accepting the fact that my bag my never show up, I used the day and its worries as an excuse to do even more shopping and prepare for the New Years weekend to come. Madrid reminded me a lot of Cairo, or what Cairo would have looked like in the 1920's and 30s - a vibrant city with stunning architecture and friendly, presentable people.
(Add a layer of dirt, 2 cups of congestion, and glitzier night-life and you've got yourself Al-Qahira Al-3ozma.) Definitely lightyears away from the narrow streets and drunken disorderlies of London. The rest of the weekend was uniform but very enjoyable. From dinner, to coffee, to bar, to club and of course the grand finale - the Space festival.
Somewhere in the middle of that I remember going through a severe down for about a couple of hours. I guess I hadn't really processed how I felt about the brand new aiport terminal reduced to smoke and debris, terrorism, another city full of gay clones wearing the same jeans, infecting each other with the same diseases, constantly breaking up, or compromising their relationships, et cetra ad infinitum. I guess its all really hard to escape when you're autopilot takes you to these cities. Add my new year evaluation mood and you could probably understand how bad it got.
One thought managed to pull me out of all that weight. Give life. In a world where all we sometimes see is destruction, I want to give life - give life to my partner, to this world, to everything that I do. Creativity breeds life. Healthy friendship. Fidelity. Honesty. I know it all sounds gooey but it was just the kick I needed to boost me back to enjoying my surroundings be it places or people.
Maybe if every day was new years day, every day we evaluated ourselves and our lives, every day checked the direction of where our careers, relationships, and personalities - maybe then we'd reach our potential as humans. Maybe that was the wisdom of Carpe Diem - to sieze and conquer each day as its own entity, as if it were the first, maybe even the last. To be in constant consideration of every action and to take the wisdom of lessons learned and their future application and place them in the space of 24 hours. Time, after all, is the most dangerous sedative. If its reigns aren't gripped it will take off as you lie sound asleep in a dark, stumbling carriage.
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