How to find ‘Newness’
Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich
31st December 2022, 23:22
The pillow is tucked in between my arms and lap; a book (Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle), tab and airpods are kind of dumped at the corner of my blanket; few minutes ago, my hands held my cheeks in a position that any day, anyone could call me a hopeless thinker; the year is passing by each moment and I am looking at the disturbed sky from my room window. Yeah, it is extremely disturbed, many crackers are howling every now and then and they look like poked dragons; the moon somehow gets one corner in the sky but it has a long grayish cloud on its face, very much like a black veil. My words perhaps sound very much taken from Keats’ or like a wanderer’s monologue from some epic saga plot. No, not at all; it’s a claustrophobic reality. It is the noisiest, polluted, and crowded night. I feel if anybody would rather prefer 3rd November or 11th March or any random date as an eve night, how would that come out? Would it be the same clumsy, hopping kind, or would it go with some newness, something that would not be called so-called?
2nd January, 2023, 10:23
This morning, everything looked more like any other day of 2022. I made my bed and went on towards the living area, picked up the newspaper. Everything had a very quotidian smell. My toothbrush, my coffee mug, my sitting style, even my couch –what will change in one day? One single night can’t change everything in me or in the surroundings. Then how will I tick off at least half of the things of my goal list? I am kind of sulking in the doubt arch. Was everything a gimmick or just to show up on the social media trends? Do the goal lists even work in reality? Is there anything that can be called as “New Me”?
I placed two notebooks beside my laptop before writing this blog. One was from ’22 and the other is the newest from this year. Three days apart, both pages had one emotion; it had a nagging tune of pessimism. I have a special section for every notebook that I have named “Whatever”. Literally whatever I feel, I jot them down and pick them up for blogs or short stories. But these two ‘Whatevers’ are very much like a morning of an abruptly ended funfair. It is as if every balloon is rolling aimlessly on the ground. But what was bothering me the most? Clearly, I had the urge to see something new, like the boy in Joyce’s “Araby”.
Last night, when I was thinking about this situation suddenly I remembered something of my father’s words. Once, our family friend’s grandfather wrote a letter to my father on new year. There was a small new year card. It had a bouquet in the middle and in the folds two pages sat calmly. I opened those fragile pages. It had so many personal messages and blessings but at the end he wrote, “Let me tell you my happy rule. Do one new task every day. Be it a new sketch, be it a new guitar tune, be it a small knitting pattern, or be it one extra step in your morning walks. Note that and see how you get new you every day. Happy New Year, my boy!” He was then 90 and my father was 25.
We are not watching our everyday lives as outsiders, and we are not laying everything in front of an observer, and that is the biggest issue of our never-ending disappointment. If we start keeping track of that one new task, then the happiness-disappointment equation will be sorted. Newness is very subjective. What you will call new or what not is a question of discussion. But one new task concept is very much inclined towards everybody’s newness. Whatever we have discussed in December, those pointers should make their way into the present. It’s not just a trend; it’s a way of living. The decisions are up to us. How you or I choose one new task completely depends on our priorities, but that one chosen new task is our way of maintaining motivation in quotidian ambience. I call that selection Ina*.
Excellence is not a foggy imagination, and every step towards that is also not an absurd reality. Just count your growth.
(*In Sanskrit, Ina (इन).—a. means determined or anything that is powerful.)