Here's To Dreaming and Striving

Friday, January 03, 2014

Hello, everyone. How’s your new year so far? I hope we all welcome this new chapter with more spirit and enthusiasm in our hearts.

I’m not a party-goer, not even on New Years, so probably like some of you, I welcomed the New Year at home with family, embracing the coziness inside while out there fireworks spluttered cheerfully and trumpets were blown. Unfortunately for Kayla, who doesn’t seem to understand the idea of New Years and why fireworks and trumpets are fun, it was a pretty much terrifying night with irritating noise. For the rest of us, however, It was a simple celebration with Ronde Jahe, a kind of Chinese as well as Javanese hot dessert containing glutinous rice balls floating in sweet ginger, which I helped Mom make. And after greeting my dear friends online, I spent the first two hours of 2014 watching a rerun of X-Men The Last Stand on a national TV channel. The movie is pretty cool.

I’ve made it a habit on new year’s day to look back on the previous year and to see what changes it has brought into my life. It’s a good way to reflect and be grateful. So, before going to sleep on the first day of the year, I looked back on 2013, and despite some bumps, big and small, it was a good year to me. It is the year when I finally got my own bedroom and had a little Christmas tree in the house. It is also the year when I met new friends and was reunited with some old ones, and is surprisingly the year when one of my best friends and both of my sisters decided to get married! 2013 also continuously reminded me that we need to let some things go in order to get better ones, and when we’re too stubborn to do so, life does it for us, sometimes in a way which we are upset about at first, but which we will end up being grateful for. I had to lose all my data in Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, which was my favorite game and which I had spent months completing, when a student of mine accidentally uninstalled it, in order to finally free up some space in my phone to be able to install Instagram, which I had always wanted to try. And later in December, I had to lose most of my data, including some valuable notes I had written, when something was wrong with my phone and I needed to hard reset it, in order for it to perform much better now.

For the first twelve days of my Christmas holiday, I had to spend each day going out and being busy preparing for my sister’s wedding. After the New Year, however, I finally got the chance to enjoy my time just staying at home and relaxing. In fact, I’ve been spending most of the first two days in 2014 happily catching up with movies I have always planned to watch, like Turbo, which I watched with my sister. There is a quote I love from the movie: “No dream is too big, and no dreamer too small.” It is a quote needs remembering, especially for us grown-ups who, with our richer knowledge and experience of life, have learned to put logic above all and have often forgotten that the impossible happens to those who strive. No dream is too big, my friends, and no dreamer is too small.

I also finally got the time to read the online articles I have Pocket-ed, and was reminded again that the most important thing in nourishing our creativity is to just show up. This is one of my New Year’s resolutions, as it always is every year. We all have that creative spark in us flaming since we were kids – either it’s finger painting or simply coloring the walls with crayons, either it’s paper folding or lego building, or gardening, or writing poems or simply making some puns, either it’s cooking ending up with horrible omelets or even just some tunes for a great-song-to-be. And somehow, some of us ignore the spark or put it out with self-doubt and fear, which is often disguised in excuses about family or work, or worse, we let others extinguish our spark with criticism. Beauty, as is any work of art, lies in the eyes of the beholder. Only because your art teacher gives your drawing an E, or your friends say that your music sucks, or that you are a horrible cook, doesn’t mean that you should stop trying. If it gives us joy, why not do it for ourselves and ignore what other people say? Writer Isabel Allende said, “Show up. Show up. Show up. In the end, the muse might show up, too.”

I also learned that my favorite football club, Chelsea, finished their first match in 2014 with a 3-0 away victory against Southampton, which is a sweet way to mark the beginning of the New Year, and is hopefully one of the many more victories to come.

The New Year has been really hopeful, and hopefully we can continue to help make this old world an even more hopeful one. Happy 2014, everyone! Here’s to dreaming and striving.