Monday, January 1, 2024

January 1, 2024 - Stale Resolutions, Fresh Trauma

Welcome to 2024, where nothing has changed. The world is still the same. Bullets are still being fired. Kids are still starving. I am still in the same clothes as last year. I spent the whole day in the same cot I was rotting the entirety of last year, wondering what my resolution for this year should be. I know it sounds like a joke, but it is not. It is probably an age-old habit that has set in inertia, and no matter how much we fail to keep up with the resolutions, we always fence off December and January with a hopeful view, thinking that whatever happened, has happened; let's try and get better starting this year. Nothing changes. You might start a new diary page with some fresh ideas, but society's script is still the (stale-)same. We go for therapy and try to heal ourselves, but the newspaper guy every morning slaps us with freshly baked trauma. We tend our garden in the winter so we can see the flowers bloom when spring comes, and we peek up to the streets to see the epoch enthusiasts chopping off our ability for personal transformation.

You say it's the quiet decisions, the daily choices that accumulate like droplets forming a mighty river. Then why are our hard-earned droplets licked and sucked by the royal pond of stagnation sentinels? You say, after all, change begins within the confines of our hearts. Then why are the custodians hell-bent on stomping on our resilience to try something new with their boots of conformity? You say it's not about grand gestures or sweeping transformations but about embracing the power of incremental change. Then why are the routine rulers throttling our personal evolution with the coded habits entrenched deep in our amalgam that wallop any kind of deviation? For how long do you think you will attribute individual drawbacks and wellness pieces of advice to the problems that require a grotesque transmogrification of intricately woven unequal threads of the conglomerate tapestry, where somewhere some are stretched thin to their ancestral cores and others suffocate under the weight of uniformity, casting shadows over the once "vibrant diversity"?

We sit in our fields of labour, yearning for a beacon of change. Some days, we succumb to weariness, letting the weight of the world convince us that our small, quiet acts of defiance are insignificant. Staring at this sea of monotony, we awaken our quiescent competence somewhere within us. Because if we don't propel ourselves forward, the suffocating grip of the corporate matrix outsources its job to the relentless assault of hunger and begar. Our pale legs and parched throats reek from waiting for freedom since forever. Can we collect all the droplets into a raging river that sweeps away the barriers to progress? Or is it just everyone for themselves, each with their own droplet, attempting to win the fight?

I begin my new year, hopefully, with a new thought, if not a new life, a clean slate, or a new page. Just me and my droplet.

- Oizys.