Bitter Sweet Contemplation Of Another New Year

It is so interesting to contemplate new years coming at one at this age. A bitter-sweet combination of having been there and done that, totally, over and over in one's life (the same old work with the same old issues and stupidities that have to be dealt with), mixed with a healthy dollop of hope about new experiences and new opportunities opening up with new stages in one's life.

A delicate balancing act at this stage in our lives I think - it is a completely different mix when you are younger and when you are older than this. One of the beauties of living - that there are so many unique and interesting stages in ones lives that can never really be known about before experiencing them (for all the reading and talking that one may do with others about what they have gone through and how things work, the vast chaotic complexity of the universe means that your individual experience of having to live through a "stage" (so to speak) is exactly that - your unique individual experience. It has special elements all of your own - which obviously have a relationship to what others have gone through, but may still be subtly different enough to make you have to pay attention to work through what it is all about.

And the other thing is that if you spent ALL your time researching exactly how you should deal with a certain stage in one's life, then you would not actually be doing any living in that stage of one's life - which sort of defeats the purpose (but, indeed, is one of the ways that some people deal with certain stages in their life - for some people, it is their whole life). So, as a consequence, because one is not fully researching every little nuance that somebody may have documented about a certain stage or experience or life event, then one simply has to live through it oneself and work out, for oneself and by oneself, what to do about it all.

That is the beauty of art - so many people can express what is the same universal story (a love story, a tragedy, etc etc) in so many different forms - they experience the situation and feel the need to express it in their own unique and individual experience - even though, for instance, they could read Tristam and Iseult, or hear Tristan und Isolde, or see Romeo and Juliet, and connect with a similar experience.