And so here we are, on the brink of the next year, and the next millennial decade. In the considerable hiatus between this post and the last much has happened. With the end of autumn came the end of my time in Paris, and I’ve been in Korea for over four weeks now. Writing that seems strange, somehow – the time has flown, and yet these past few weeks have been brimming with experiences and feelings and sights that make each day feel fuller than they did back at home. Though I intended to write and tried to once or twice, I’ve been so caught up in the rush of life here that I wasn’t able to do so properly. But now, on the eve of the new year, I’ve found a quiet moment to reflect and to speculate; the last moment of its kind of 2019.
Just as the earth slips around the sun and the moon slips into the next phase of its cycle, so we are slipping into the next year of the millennium. The flow of time is inevitable and unerring; somehow the movement of the earth manifests itself not as a tangible phenomenon but rather as the passing of time. Its circular orbits are translated into linear streams of numbers with which we mark and measure our lives, and with which we crown the next year 2020.
It’s funny how we force our lives to fit into this frame of numbers and measurement, when really we were meant to live them organically. Of course, our calendars are based off physical phenomena – the rotation of the earth around the sun, or the phases of the moon – but it can still seem jarring, standing on the threshold of a new and unknown decade intimidatingly marked 2020. I guess there’s a disparity between our world of order and numbers and the natural, formless flow of time. The passage into the new year is really the same transition from night to day that takes place every evening, but it is our perception of it that imbues it with value.
2019 has most probably been one of the most important years of my life. I say most probably since I feel that every year is important, but this year is more obviously so: I finished school; I travelled independently for the first time; I turned 18; I did my first job and earned my first salary; I started liking mushrooms. In short, I’ve grown a lot this past year, and not only because of these milestones, but from the accumulation of different, everyday happenings. Our characters shift subtly and ceaselessly under the influence of our experiences, just as the motion of the waves shape the rocks into new forms. As time goes on we build upon different parts of ourselves. Some aspects are added and others, of course, are lost, for better or for worse – but we are a bit like canvases at birth, our actions and thoughts and experiences the artist. Today I am the sum of 18 years of life experience; next year I will add another year to my repertoire, and the year after that will be the year of my twentieth birthday.
It seems strange to me that I’ve been alive for nearly two decades, when a decade sounds like an unbridgeable chasm of time. Although I knew that others had grown old before me, I always thought that I wouldn’t grow old, as they had done, but instead be young, and myself, forever.
But time continues to pass in such a way that we don’t notice it. Days melt into nights that fade into weeks and months and suddenly we’re different to how we were before. This is how we grow up, and grow old – we don’t suddenly wake up one day and realise we how different we are. You grow older without your knowing; you do it behind your own back. And only when you look behind you do you realise how far you’ve come, and how much you’ve changed.
At what age are we most ourselves? I used to ask myself this question a lot, believing that everyone had an age at which they would be their truest, optimum self. But this was the wrong question to ask. Our true selves do not exist in the past, or in our childhood, to become lost as we grow up – we do not flower at one age to become an empty shell of who we should be once that age has passed. Who we are is defined by who we are in this moment. Because one thing I have realised in 2019 is that the most important moment of all is the present. Though we can speculate about the future and reminisce about the past, we cannot fully, truly experience any other moment than the present. And though I don’t intend to make resolutions in the conventional sense of the term, next year I want to live more in the moment: to worry less about the future or the past and instead fully immerse myself in the present.
As I leave 2019 and come into the new year, I hope to become more fearless, more thoughtful, and more caring. The thoughts written here are a message from what is now the past; they are the parting words of 2019, remnants of past thoughts and the remains of bygone days.
