By the time you read this article, 2011 will definitely be over. The thought of another year being a mere statistic in the record books is for me a little sad.
This is part of the reason why I never really plan to celebrate New Year's eve because I tend to descend into depression, and trying to plaster a fake smile over my face so as to be a part of the revelry is too much of an effort.
I have often self-analysed as to why I get so miserable around year-end, and all I can come up with is that it's the moment when the passing of time is most evident. I have no anxieties about getting old and hardly have to stress over losing my hair, but maybe as the years pass I become more aware of the changes that are destined to happen to the world that surrounds me.
Change in principle is good. Things move forward through revolution, evolution and even resolution and we find ourselves in a different space and slowly we adjust and, for most, life just goes on.
It's crazy that as time passes, things that I love go from being cutting-edge to nostalgic, yet to me they are still as cool as they always were.
I find it hard to believe that the single Juicy by American rapper Notorious B.I.G. is now 17 years old, so if I were to drop this party banger while at a barbecue in front of teens, many of them would never have heard of it. And it would probably sound just as dated to them as my parents' music did to me when I was a kid.
Imagine: it was 2003 when MySpace was launched and by 2006 it was the most popular social networking site in the world. It was probably around the same time that I became aware of a new site that was launched to serve the college kids in the US called Facebook. I remember, many friends who had set up an account on the new-kid-in-town had their lives on both of the sites for a while. But when ‘the crowd' decided that Facebook was the one to be with, MySpace was dumped and ‘un-friended'. The legacy is that the biggest and coolest thing five years ago is dead in the water now. It's hard to believe that the same could happen to Facebook but it's a distinct possibility.
My point, if indeed I have a point, is that time waits for no-one and for nothing. If that's the case then we have to ensure that we focus on the stuff that has true lasting value for us. This value will be different for each of us, so far be it for me to suggest an answer.
Maybe that's the real test we face with the passing of time. It's a countdown clock pressuring us to work out the riddle of the meaning of life.
2012-ingly Yours
