2016 More or Less

Enters New Year. As it swooshes down the catwalk of time, to the sound of firecrackers, bows of appreciation and glances of envy, it needn't bow out to the boos. New Year, unlived yet enlivened, spells a frisson of hope and promise and tipsy delusion, as we prepare to wear it and kiss it and taint it. Enters New Year and Exits Lady Macbeth, the year that was and is no more. New Year comes dressed up with little more than an itsy-bitsy accoutrement of fantasies dressed up as resolutions.

Park La Brea Housing Development, Los Angeles, CA, photography by Jeffrey Milstein, via Wired

Resolution, little more than the promise to self to make this year 'better', according to parametres that each self holds within the safe of their hearts and minds. Resolution, the quick-fix, short-lived counter-balance remedy to the obligatory guilt trip that seals off holiday indulgence, and all of our slack and sloven moments that took the year past, past its prime.

However we wouldn't be hard put upon if we took a long hard look at the way we conduct our lives - or rather at the way we conduct Life.

Beverley Hills, ibid

To look in the mirror, past that face that is looking back at you. See the bigger picture. Take a bird's eye view of Life, beyond the picket fence of fenced-in existence and suburban linearity. And that is when the realisation might happen. That collectively humanity are the result of what collectively humanity create. What we put in, we get out, with all the consequences that impact our environment in its broadest, wildest - and wisest sense. The natural world we have remade to fit the human vision of a humanised world, where nature is tamed, dislodged out of its environment, flattened out, plasticised and monetised.

Life is beautiful and precious. Life is an entitlement and a right. Yet humanity in its inhumanity will disfigure it or kill it, as the world is wasting away under the waste it creates. Now do we still want to be single-mindedly navel-gazing at the size of our waistlines and base a resolution around that - even build a social media audience around it, when we need to look at the bigger picture and rethink society as a whole... Here is a New Year's resolution that is worth its weight in gold: this year I shall not keep up with the Joneses!

P.S: Make 2016 a year that counts, by following La Baguette's mini-series, Awesome Acts of Kindness for Self, Others and the Earth!