Three New Years

I have three new years. The first is the official January 1st. The second is the unofficial Chinese new year which is nevertheless always celebrated by everyone in one way or another. The third is my birthday in February.

Hence in my mind I have three chances to make great restarts. Or to fortify whatever I already started on January 1st.

I always get some kind of sick every January. Well, not always-always. It started being always sometime after I realised that my dayjob was making me soul-sick. I dreaded each new year as it felt like another year of the same unhappy labor.

I know it is mostly psychological than physiological. I get all flu-like symptoms but without the fever. I get bad cramps and stomachaches that keep me in bed for a few days. I get bad migraines. It’s like a sudden shutdown of my body. It’s like a perfect excuse not to go back to work yet.

This year I started feeling the symptoms a couple of days ago. Severe fatigue, allergy attacks, headaches, feverish but without a fever. But I barrelled through them and made art, started new daily routines-that-are-not-routines. I want to change my days big-time this year. I want to get rid of the getting sick. It’s really a soul sickness more than anything.

Why only now? Because for the first time I am truly starting a new year at rock bottom. Previously I always defaulted into all the usual mainstream flow of Things because rent was always due and I didn’t want to fall behind and I also always kept saying to myself that I’ll fix things after that project but then another project comes along and I said alright after that project and then it’s another new year.

But this year is going into the second pandemic year, and I am already six months behind on rent, and no amount of default saved me last year. What got me through many of the months of 2020 was everything out of default. So this new year I’m going to try for making real serious changes on the very fabric of my everyday life. Uproot all the old routines and turn them from mindless automatic habits into mindful conscious movements. I want to turn everything I do in a day into a form of meditation, prayer, or enchantment. I want everything I do to be a mindful deliberate movement towards the life that my soul longs for.

It is said that a person becomes an entirely new person every seven years because that’s when our bodies complete its regeneration process – new cells, etc. My birthday this year is a seventh year. It is also, once and for all, a reminder than I am more than old enough to stand up for the things I believe in that were born out of my own experiences and lessons learned. My life has earned a certain validity and a decent amount of wisdom. I must own it. I must use it. I must not apologise for it. The first to accept myself must be myself.