Lost in Reverie, But Not Without Hope

The year 2024 is gone. It feels as if it went by like froth disappears into nothingness, in a second. Yesterday it was January 2024; today it's 2025. We hardly realize the fleeting nature of time unless it’s a new year. And, in fact, memories are what will remain alive out of a year dead now. And life goes on.

Some of us become overly pedantic in the multivariate analysis of a year past us—gleefully counting achievements, mourning human deaths, reflecting on personal failures, and setting new targets, and on and on. Brimming with zeal and zest, we formulate a plan—to achieve financial independence, find a life partner, build muscles, bust a gut studying, go to a foreign country, touch the higher hierarchical levels, and so on and so forth. A few of us may achieve that, and a lot of us may not—and it could be true of every year forgotten now. No wonder.

A number of us, however, sweep the significance of the New Year under a carpet, miserably declaring it to be nothing short of meaningless. Meaningless 31st December, and meaningless 1st January. To them, the year has passed by so riddled with disappointment that to now call for a mere change causes respiratory pain. Hardly anything has improved in their lives, if not nothing.

They keep wondering what monster dwelt inside them all year long that fought its best to make their lives unchanged and a victim of nagging inertia. They don’t react, they don’t argue, they don’t discuss, and they don’t explain. In complete wonder abandon, they keep themselves. Looking toward the heavens, recalling their 365-long sluggishness, bowing their head in shame, and sleeping the horrors of stagnancy dead.

Here begins the story of my decades-long duration of being stuck in some esoteric rut and the nonexistent reality of having changed anything of substantial value.

The year was 2014, a decade ago. Inspired, I took a naïve decision to set the future prospects of my life right. Things kept cooking up in my head; I was full of energy one moment, but a false notion of the long extent of time I had for that to work on resulted in self-sabotaging the next moment. I sat down, tried to work, but to no avail. Distraction and my parochial vision of youth-lasts-long hampered what I had set out to do.

The first year went by that way. The second year came, and I made the same promises to myself, and I saw the same me doing hardly anything all year long—reason being that time is my friend and won’t let me age. Come the third, fourth, fifth... and now it has reached a 10-year timeline... I am still in the delusion that I am a baby to be taken care of, loved, and provided with everything... when the reality stands that I am an old infant.

Realizations would come every now and then in general and every year in particular that I was doing something wrong, but the intensity of them was too ephemeral to have any lasting influence on my happy self. I have been happy doing whatever is in my ‘capacity’—both ‘bad’ and ‘good’—to keep myself contented and engaged. The happy self I maintain, however, lacks substance and is a form of a clock concealing my initial reluctance to commit to work.

Whereas it has been in my subconscious mind to do one goddamn thing and master it, I never mustered the courage to do so. Never mapped anything to reality. Always lived in reverie. My utterly false, feeble fantasy never fell apart. This is how complex a human brain is that it can ruin you without letting you do anything against that ruin.

Recalling the decade, I am shocked to establish the truth of the deadness of it. I send chills down my spine as to how nothing has changed in me, and in fact, everything has escalated to the point of no return. Wishing the revival of the 3650 days approximately is now a dead exercise. It feels as if I have been living in a dream where both the protagonist and the antagonist have been one and the same. Each one deceiving the other.

How I wish I could use a magical pen to narrate the minute details of my life here! That said, it reminds me how I once bowed down to God for long enough to have any mercy in me, and a few days later, how I was back to my stuck life. Quite a laughing stock I was to myself!

My comfort zone has wreaked havoc on my life. Even now, as I write this and come face to face with the first day of 2025, I am not fully sure whether my convictions would have the power to have me mend my life or not.

But against all odds, we mustn’t afford to lose hope... This keeps people going, and I still have faith in the spark lying somewhere alive in the deepest recesses of my being, struggling to light my whole psychic fabric. This—I take refuge in. This—I thank the Almighty for. This—I mustn’t let die down. And this—I must now care to work on. Albeit the recurrent failures I faced in the days, months, and years prior. May God help all of us and make us wise!

Happy New Year!