Take birthdays for example. You start off being blissfully unaware, except for the fact that you get new dresses and sweets on the day. Then you eagerly count the days to hit the teens, as though being called a teen is like being conferred the Nobel prize. THEN you eagerly count the days to becoming a major, whatever that means. After that it is all downhill.
When you near thirty, you are sort of indifferent to the age, except if you, like me, have started losing hair or find that your hair has got bored with its native hue and wants to change to silver. Even then, it is not like your birthday is specifically the cause of concern. Near 40, you start sighing. Yeah, I know, people chant 'Forty is the new twenty' and all that but THINK. Did you feel the need to say 'Twenty is the new ten' when you neared twenty or would you have been furious if someone said that to you? At that time, twenty seemed more desirable than ten; NOW twenty seems more desirable than forty which is why you like to fool yourself into thinking that, maybe, you can continue to think of yourself as being twenty after all.
Fifty arrives and, around then, you are more worried about the aches and pains in your body, your increasingly 'powerful' eyes and sundry such things to really bother about the age. Sixty and above, if you are lucky, you will remember your age. Or, perhaps, you have too much trouble even remembering your name to even bother to try and remember your age. Anyway, around then, you have come full circle and stopped bothering about your birthday.
And, so, with this New Year! You start off only thinking of it as a celebration. Around your twenties, you suddenly want to get on with life, whatever it means, want to improve yourself, whatever THAT means, and so you start making resolutions to improve yourself. By around fifty, after decades of religiously making resolutions and breaking them before you are done with the hangover, you stop making them, more especially because you have realized that, if you have not yet STARTED on becoming a Saint, there is no way you are going to get to where you can place orders for your saffron robes before your children have to organize a shroud for you. So much for improving yourself by resolutions!
Or so it should be. Me, I find that I am mentally (retarded? No, thanks, that's not the word I was looking for), still 30, so here the year comes and I fret about the resolutions I need to make.
Ah! Well! It does not matter anyway what I resolve. I'll break it anyway by Jan 2!
A Very Happy New Year 2020 to all of you.
