A YEAR IN RETROSPECT

A year, never mind whether it drags on slowly at the time or rushes by with a few blinks of the eye, always seems just several hours long when we are past it. It is as though our mind has taken the liberty to dismember the sequence of moments past and make myriad collages out of them. I don't own my mind. It is my de facto authority. I make of myself what it makes of me. And with everything that I do in a year, it grows, dragging me along. It shows me the world as it sees and with every passing day it perceives more and comprehends more.

I am my heart. I know what I want. I can sense beauty. I can feel love. But I can't survive. That is for my mind to do. How much a friend my mind is to me lets me do what I want. I would choose almost always what my mind would refuse to accept as profitable. My mind is right and I am true.

It is most often that we chance upon the unexpected that gives us the happiness we seek at the moment. Little things of beauty we hold on to and joy puts the angelic smile on our lips, the childlike sparkle in our eyes. My mind suspects. It debates. But it is trapped. It has been shackled by the prejudices and vices of the world. It distrusts trust. It can tell right from wrong. It is logical. But I can tell good from bad. I am free. I believe in the impossible and listen to the silence of my loved one.

I built quite a relationship with the world, thus, in the year bygone. In simple words, I grew up a tad and spun a personality and identity around my demeanour. Or so I would like to believe at the moment and precisely this my mind would prove to you now. It was, actually, a cocktail of a quarter hardships, some new assignments, a gill of fun, a pint of depression, gallons of love and a pinch of misunderstandings.

Every year is the same. A sequence of memories that last to come back to us when they feel most noticed; slaves to our mind that worships mood. A year passed is another glossy magazine’s back cover folding in on the last page, the glue stick being kept back in the stand at the edge of the table, the quill being replaced in the ink bottle – the latest addition to the library in our “mind palace”.