With my grandkids, two inspirations for my hope.
Another year is ending and in a few days 2013 will begin. For me, 2012 has been like a whirlwind, so much has been happening and I’ve been so busy! Since for me a year is much more than time intervals that limit one from another every 365 days, I like to think of them by proper names according to what they mean to me, what I plan to achieve in their course or what events take place in each one.
It may seem crazy, and perhaps it is, but personalizing the years helps me to get a hold of them and to live them more intensely. I make better use of time when I assume, with empathy, those periods I claim to fulfill options and realize dreams. Not only does it work for me, but I can deal with adversity more optimistically.
It was not always so. Just over a decade ago I felt the year’s passage as a weak-willed segment between Christmases. Waiting for December was the illusion, the mainstay of the soul to achieve what I considered the best of each year –parties, overindulging, revelry, parades of friends we hadn’t seen since last year … – with the additional childish expectation of thinking that perhaps the new year would be the one to make a difference: who’d know if perhaps we would be lucky enough to dawn in a better Cuba one of those days. Thus, the hidden sign behind the lights on the Christmas tree and behind the greetings and the toasts was always the longing, the quiet feeling of undigested and poorly assumed deprivation, frustration and dissatisfaction. If I didn’t succumb back then to the national epidemic that I am in the habit of calling “the zombie effect” it was simply miraculous, by chance, or perhaps because my testy nature always refuses to accept resignation as a destination (or to accept fate with resignation, as a good Christian friend would say).
The truth is that at one point I caught a glimpse of that light in all of us and came out of the quagmire. Ever since that day, though December continues to be a happy, joyful and festive month for me, far from being a goal, it’s a pretext for invoking both my best angels and to exorcise my worse demons. Each December is a watchtower to view the horizon ahead of me, and to choose my own path towards it. 2000 was, if memory serves me, the first year I named in the millennium: I named it Awakening because that was what my spirit felt, and since then, each New Year’s eve I celebrate the christening of the coming year.
I wanted to share with you these memories to wish you success and prosperity in the New Year and so that, together, we make them ours. I wish you much health and lots of the good energy to achieve our personal goals. Recently, I choose the name of my 2013: it will be called Hope. I hope that my readers will understand why. A big hug to everyone,
Eva-Miriam Celaya
December 28 2012
