The Magenta Manifesto - Learning to Cope with the Myth of the New

You know how it is every year around the start of December, pondering what to do on New Year's Eve?  You don't, good for you!

I dislike New Year with a passion.  It's like the flamboyant partner of Christmas with its glitzy dress and disheveled make-up.  Religion is left outside the pub with a glass of lemonade and a coloring book.

My primary objection to New Year is the societal push to do something with both the evening before it and the 365 days which succeed it.  It's not new.  It is a continuation. Change can happen at any point, not just at the cuddly stroke of midnight with the crashing of ceremonial fireworks, so intrinsically tied up with Guy Fawkes and his failed attempt at prematurely closing Parliament within the UK culture, that it's difficult to foresee anything positive in the act of igniting small explosions.

I have been suckered in the past into trying to make resolutions.  The notion of resolutions imply an end goal and just a general sense of finality.  But our lives are not that straightforward.  Curbing natural desires or indeed, throwing out the big concepts in the hope that somehow they may be realised, is just a futile endeavor.  You can't find true love simply by wishing for it.  You can't stop drinking or smoking through the dainty act of writing down the request, as though it were a mantra.

Each New Year becomes for many a period of introspection and reflection.  This can be both positive and negative.  Considering what has been lost and gained may provide the necessary impetus to pick yourself up and 'start again' or more accurately, drop what is holding you back and move in a different direction.

As I lay here now reflecting on the last year, I have experienced the loss of two friends, prematurely through illness and a growing realisation of how much people mean to me.

In 2015, I can only advise myself and others to regard it not as some wonderful solution, but instead as part of a cycle.  Artificial time marked by equinoxes.  You can't control everything, yet neither can everything be ascribed to fate or some other divinity depending upon your beliefs.

My challenge to you all and only you can answer this honestly, is to determine how much you have achieved in the previous year.  Have you been as good a human being as you wished?  Can you contemplate things getting better either through individual effort or with assistance?  Will 2015 become the year when you value yourself as much as others value you?

If you get nothing else from my diatribe, please remember that whatever happens this year, logical or not, the bungee rope ain't broken yet.

                                                               Barry Watt - Wednesday 31st December 2014.