By Roy Alex
Mannar, Sri Lanka, Dec 30, 2024: The week after Christmas becomes a time of stocktaking, examining the highs and lows of the past year, and setting hopes and resolutions for the year ahead.
This has always been my customary approach, but my perspective was profoundly challenged this year. During a month-long experiment at an old-age home, the elderly people posed an unambiguous question to my usual New Year reflections.
Once, during a casual conversation with one of the residents there, I spoke with great enthusiasm and excitement about the new year’s arrival. Then he looked at me with a graceful smile on his wrinkled face and said, “The calendar will change, and the numbers in the year will shift from one to the next, and most human beings will stay the same.”
For him and many others there, the excitement over the clock ticking backwards or forwards held little significance. Their lives revolved around the present moment where joy was found in the simplicity of everyday life. I observed them savouring life’s simple pleasures- engaging in a warm conversation, enjoying the aroma of a fresh cup of tea, or feeling the sunlight on their skin in the morning hours.
Their profound wisdom taught me that rather than being overly excited about the arrival of a new year, we should focus on how we use our time and the depth of presence we bring to each moment of each day. The passage of time alone does not make any changes in our lives. It is about what we do with time and the deliberate decisions we make that truly have the power to transform us.
In the New Year, we are not reborn as new individuals; we remain the same people with our brokenness and imperfections. However, each New Year offers us an opportunity to mend the cracks in our lives and address our imperfections through the wisdom gained from past mistakes.
I recently read about a traditional Japanese art form called ‘Kintsugi’ that involves repairing broken pottery using lacquer mixed with powdered gold, silver, and platinum. This Japanese art form highlights the repair with gold rather than trying to hide the damage or cracks.
In our usual repair works, we take special care to cover up the crack, but the Kintsugi art form beautifully showcases the crack. Kintsugi is not just an art form but also a philosophical concept which got assimilated into Zen Buddhist thought. According to this philosophy, failures, mistakes, and blows are integral to human experiences. This philosophy encourages us to accept our past vulnerabilities and integrate them as golden threads into the continuum of our existence.
As we embrace the New Year, let us remember that every setback is an opportunity to grow stronger and wise. We need to make use of our challenges and imperfections as a stepping stone, filling the cracks of life with gold of courage, perseverance and kindness. Human beings are bound to make mistakes and experience failures, but these scars of failures would not diminish us. Instead, by approaching them positively and learning from them, they add depth, wisdom and resilience to our character.
It is not necessary to burden ourselves with the pressure of resolutions and the weight of the past mistakes as we step into the New Year. It is unwise to place so much emphasis on the linear passage of time when life itself is lived moment by moment. The essence of life unfolds in each breath we take, every smile we share and every act of kindness that we offer.
The elderly people in the old age home taught me that true wisdom lies not in measuring life by years or months, but by the depth of presence that we bring to each day. In this New Year, let us make a shift in how we approach and live our lives, going beyond merely flipping the calendar.
May this New Year be a time to cherish every moment, celebrate the gift of today and embrace the peace of the present- free from the burdens of the past and worries of the future. Happy New Year.
(Father Roy Alex is a member of the Jesuits’ Kerala province currently doing the Tertianship program at Kandy in Sri Lanka.)