A New Year

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.