It’s really awesome how all of us look upon each new year:
as if it were something completely new, a diary full of empty pages waiting to
get filled up with new events. Is this the case, however ? Unfortunately, not.
To tell the truth, each new year is not a tabula rasa, a letter-less blackboard
anxious for what we are going to write on it. And this is because we always
full upon entering a new year. Full of events and memories, full of opinions, likes,
dislikes, wishes and curses… We understand that this is so in due course, when
we take a pencil and try to write something on the pages that we believed were
empty and realize that they are already written. They have been written with
our fears and hopes that come out of our past and determine our present.
We visit, for example, a place. Even if we have never before
been to this place, it is possible that it will remind us of something. But
even if it doesn’t, we will soon grow anxious to capture it somehow and in this
way document our presence there. Thus, between our eyes and the place a lens
soon intervenes: the lens of our mobile phone or of our camera. Soon afterwards
we fall into indecision about which is the best angle to take the photo. We are
already lost into senseless anxieties and thoughts that are connected with
memories and form threads of thought which make the feeling that this place
ought to leave us with, fleeting, even indifferent.
And if this place reminds us of something, then it should
come as no surprise if it triggers memories from parts of ourselves that we
thought we had left behind but now come back uninvited, making us realize that
the onion we were fiercely peeling off has still got too many peels and that
the more we move towards its heart the more these peels are soaked with what we
used to be, what we still are.
Can one escape himself? No, not as long as he is himself, as
long as he identifies himself with his ego, as long as there is no room inside
him for some tranquility and silence. Not really.
