BURYING THE YEAR

Usually, I'm not one to take stock of the year. Analysing life, as though living is some data on an Excel sheet, is not for me. It's too deliberate an act. And for someone who breezes through life in spurs of spontaneity, it just has never come to mind. But there is a certain necessity for reflection this year. Burying the year, as I've dubbed it. It's been a year in which I fulfilled a lifelong wish. For the first time in my life, I set a definite goal and poured all into it. If you start a year achieving the seemingly impossible—considering where you are from and the resources at your disposal—there is a way it encourages you to have more faith in the year. And so, this is the year I thought would be a defining point for me as a person, a year in which I would make the most of my skill and career. It has been anything but. This year has battered me with many disappointments that crumbled my resolve. It has made me doubt myself countless times. The fire of the year is burning to its certain death, and everything I thought I would have achieved by now remains a wish. And it's not for lack of effort or trying.

---

Therapy, self-observation and psychoanalysis equipped me with tools to go through difficult times without falling apart. The meditation techniques I learned from Sam Harris helped me ease my way out of circumstances that would have broken me in years past. During one of my hardest times, a friend who was staying with me was impressed by how calm I was. Not that it's easy to do, but I failed less than I succeeded in picking myself up and reminding myself that difficulties have their timeline and that these failures and disappointments don't define me. I understand that emotions are transient and are not to dictate my mood and course of action.

Keeping a stoic outlook when going through challenges has always seemed to me what strength is. I ended one of my poems with the phrase, “this is not the night I break.” But in the latter months of this year, I learned that allowing myself to break, to despair and mourn loss and disappointment isn't always a weakness and that it could be what I need to find the strength to forge ahead.

So, I allowed myself to break down and fall apart. I grieve my disappointments. The result of that was a vulnerability I never knew I could achieve. A total displacement of my ego. I have clarity about questions and issues I've been bothered with for months. I mended, not only my relationship with God but with the woman I love. Things are far from perfect. But I have more clarity on the kind of man I want to be years from now. During that time, the title of Clayton Christensen's book, ‘How Will You Measure Your Life?’ keeps coming to mind. I realised that continuing on the path I was on, I wouldn't arrive at the destination I want for my life. That version of myself wouldn't arrive at the man I want to be in 20, or 30 years’ time. There is a need for repentance. I took it.

Allowing myself to fall apart wasn't such a bad idea. I've learned to break when I need it. It's not weakness, it's allowing myself to enjoy the rich range of my human experience, to enjoy the healing that comes after pain, the renewal after a breaking. Life has shown me that decay can precede renewal, that broken things can make beautiful vessels, and that clarity can be birthed from moments of grief and sorrow. I'm burying the year with this lesson.