I love New Year! I love church and chippies and ceilidhs and kilts and random parties where I know almost no one and random parties where I know everyone and banter and funky music and dancing and staying up with people you love till the sun rises. But most of all I love it because it's new!
l love the fact that a new year is new because it is the best excuse for a fresh start. I'm always in need of fresh starts and frankly I could embark on them anytime, but there's something so official and formal about New Year that makes it easier.
The first definition of the word "new" that comes up in the Oxford dictionary is "not existing before". I always look at a new year like looking at a whiteboard... I like to pretend that it's wiped clean so I can cover with new scribblings that didn't exist before, but really, in truth, it's not. I can choose at this point (at any point really) to have some stuff wiped clean off it, whilst others stay, sometimes by choice, sometimes not. I love the future but the whiteboard isn't completely white because I will not, I cannot forget the past... the past that hurts, heals, strengthens, weakens, teaches, marks, scars... so full of memories... one of the reasons I love blogging is because I love memories and I love reminiscing. And it is for this same reason that I love new year... it gives me a chance to look back and think over and be thankful for all the things that have happened, "good" and "bad", and how I lived and review how I should be living this next year...
Or at least that's the way it should be... that kinda back-fired a little on me this year. Over the last wee while I went through a period of feeling bogged down by guilt and frustrated with myself for not taking opportunities I could have taken, for not putting 110% in when I should have. L'esprit d'escalier once again. But I realised that there is no need for that... God has set me free from sin and guilt and shame... rather than looking back and being frustrated about the times when I didn't give enough, I should be looking and moving forward and learning from past mistakes rather than dwelling on them.
I'm back in France now; Back with sun-lit alps, amazing supermarkets, le français, and keyboards with accents, and am feeling hopeful and expectant! I'm setting out into 2007 with eyes open, ready to live whatever comes along. You see I don't want to settle for mediocre Christianity... (Is it possible to be a "middle of the road, mediocre" Christian?) I want to live life to the full, I want to live life full of God!
I leave with some photographic highlights of my séjour en Ecosse
floating candles at dinner on Christmas Eve
silliness with the sister
ah joys of Scotland; friends, family, boy in kilt... I will miss you...Scottish rain... I will miss you not
Bonne rentrée à tous
10 comments:
p.s time date is wrong... thanks to the silliness of blogger... I actually wrote most of this post on the 6th
But then what is time? As far as I can figure, it's just an abstract consept we use to try and make sense of the world. Thus for someone, what you call the '6th' could very easily have been the 2nd could it not?
I beg to disagree potter... we have the earth's rotation to dictate time... God created the very concept of it... day and night... and then there's seasons...
also it was important to me to mention the fact that I wrote this post on the 6th as it clarifies the fact that I was in fact in France on the 6th, not on the 2nd... a fairly significant difference à mon avis. hehe nothing like being argumentative with you! :P
Ah but it all depends on which calendar you choose to use. For instance, based on the Julian calendar, which is still used by the Russian orthadox chusrch, it is still Decamber 2007. A more extreme example would be the islamic calendar which considers this year to be 1428 or the jewish which has it as 5767. Very arbritrary if you ask me.
arbitrary perhaps, but such systems have been around for hundreds of years and have become thoroughly engrained in our cultures and mindsets and so have become more than just arbitrary. No one's suddenly going to get up and make up some new calender now... it'd be harder than trying to convert America into using the metric system... unless you can inform me otherwise or can think of a better way of doing it yourself? :P
A lack of reply doesn't signify defeat (yet).
I feel we've been taking a rather simplistic 'classical' view of all this. From Einstein's theory of special relativity, it can be shown that for someone travelling at a speed close to the speed of light, relative to a stationary observer, time will in fact be moving slower. So, if I was travelling at a similar speed for an extended length of time, I would be four days behind you, thus your blog would have been published on the 2nd not the 6th. I knew there was a reason I studied all this stuff! :P
unfortunately we are not as yet able to travel near the speed of light on this earth (as far as I am aware) and therefore I motion that your argument though interesting is irrelevant! See you astrophysicists ;P
P.S in response to your txt, irrelevant arguments/suggestions lose rather than win debates! So you need to come up with a reply Mr Potter :P
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