Friday, January 1, 2010

Happy New Year 2010

New year is a time for celebration. For some others it is a time for contemplation. For me, it is mostly the latter, though today I spent most of my day quietly, in hibernation. The rest was essential because I ran a full marathon yesterday, and my whole body was sore from the race. This was my third marathon and my fastest, although I bettered my time by only 3 minutes. Now as the first day of 2010 comes to an end, I am looking back at 2009. It was surely an eventful year. Unfortunately, "eventful" is not always a happy word. But then some bit of pain and gloom is inevitable in life. In fact, they are an essential part of life; without setbacks, the term "happiness" itself would completely lose it's meaning. Thus, I find it odd when people mindlessly forward emails wishing you "12 Months of Happiness, 52 Weeks of Fun, 365 Days Success, 8760 Hours Good Health, 52600 Minutes Good Luck, and 3153600 Seconds of Joy." Is it really possible to feel joy every second of our life? Would "joy" remain joyous if it were to be experienced every second of life? I am reminded here of the famous experiments in which a set of rats starved themselves to death by continuously pressing a lever that gave them joyous ecstasy. Heroin and cocaine addicts do the same. So, for 2010, I wish all (including me) a life that has the right balance of sadness and happiness. Let there be enough struggles and sadness in life so that we can really feel and appreciate happiness in our lives. Happy New Year 2010!!

3 comments:

  1. Hi
    Wishing you a very happy new year.I wish that in coming years also you will have same kind of fighter instinct in you and will get real joy of life.
    prachi.

    ReplyDelete
  2. congrats on completing yet another marathon!
    I think the rat example is too extreme...

    ReplyDelete
  3. @ Prachi: Thank you Prachi. And wish you a great new year ahead as well.

    @ Rama: Thank you Ma'am. I agree, the rat example was probably a bit extreme. I guess it would have not seemed so, if I wrote a longer post. But, that's the example that came to my mind while I was writing the post late last night. Thanks for your critical feedback :-)

    ReplyDelete