It's a wonderful feeling to be winding down after one helluva year. As it draws to a close, with the promise of a new dawn fast approaching, I reflect on what I've learned this past year and I've gotta tell ya, it's certainly gonna put me in good stead for the year to come.
The year rushed by in such a blur, I feel January was only yesterday, with its promises of an stimulating new job as a magazine editor. Come March and that new job had suddenly became very old, and in August I ran out of lube and decided not to buy another tube. My time spent bent over very quickly lost its allure. It was time to stand upright again and reclaim my dignity. Not that the work itself was an issue, I love creating magazines, but the people, the people, oh, my god, the people.
That was the first thing I learnt this year: I have a very low tolerance for people in positions of authority who have no right to 'em. Corporate culture teems with such people: talentless, mediocre morons, with chips on their shoulders as big as the iceberg that sunk the Titanic. So talentless and insecure, they never actually do any work, too busy are they trying to project their own mediocrity onto the more talented, intelligent and hardworking people around 'em. Good luck to 'em...or, more appropriately, goodbye to 'em. Their world is not for me.
Yet, in March, while still bent over, I lost my perspective, and on my birthday, I fell prey to the sly machinations of a fuzzy faced fiend who stank of stale tobacco and cheap beer. "Can you tell me if that breakfast cereal on the top shelf has sugar in it," he asked me. Poor thing, I thought, he can't read. But, as I reached up, he reached around and slyly lifted my wallet from my bag. "Nope, no sugar," I said. "Thanks," he said, and took the cereal, which he promptly paid for, along with a stash of tobacco, I can only suspect, with my credit card.
And there I'd learned something else: never pity anyone, ever, and be highly suspicious if someone who reeks of stale tobacco and cheap beer wants to buy a breakfast cereal with no sugar in it.
I comforted myself with the thought – it was my birthday after all and I had a dinner booked at Sydney Opera House's Bennelong Restaurant still to celebrate – that perhaps I'd paid off some of my karmic debt. Throughout my life there was one incident that I thought about often with regret and remorse: when I was 15, a friend of mine dared me to steal a black bag that sat atop a pram in the old and rundown Carrington Hotel in Katoomba, which we spent many bored teenage moments in, running amuck. And I did. The haul wasn't much: $10, which we straightaway spent on hamburgers. But the guilt was palpable and I couldn't help feel that I had somehow redeemed myself when my wallet was stolen on my birthday.
After March, the year rolled on at a relatively steady pace, though my lube didn't seem to be working as it should. The stress of walking around bent over started to contaminate the rest of my life, and I became short tempered and unreasonable. Only after I decided to chuck the lube out and stand upright again, did things start to fall back into place, culminating in the sweetest moment of 2008, when, on a hot spring day in September, I met up with my dad and we took a long stroll through Glebe to Jubilee Park in Annandale, after a seven year estrangement.
It was in Glebe that I lived with my dad and my mum when I first came into the world. We lived in a small flat with a large balcony that overlooked Blackwattle Bay. My dad pointed out the flat to me and later sent me a photo of it. I went home that night after our stroll, my heart so light, it felt as though doves had flown in to roost. The gentle flutter of their wings lulled me into exquisite sleep. If only I was Sleeping Beauty and could slumber for 100 years. If only I could bottle that feeling, I'd be a millionaire.
And there I learned something else in 2008: that love can take you on the most incredible and unexpected twists and turns. Even estrangement, which seems to be the antithesis of love, can in fact be a stepping stone on love's journey to deeper understanding and respect.
So, with the stress of an unsuitable job behind me and a new and brilliant chapter in my relationship with my father before me, I met the remainder of 2008 with a newfound strength, which saw me through my four-year-old son's long convalescence, when he toughed it out, fought and won the fight against the Pilgrim Flu, pneumonia and glandular fever. It saw me through the death of my dear grandma, whose end I rejoiced as now, I hoped, she could find peace after seven long years of tormented thoughts. It saw me through the choice I had to make to leave my job... the money was great, but my happiness was much more important.
Ultimately, it reawakened in me the recognition of one of my highest values, which is to never take love for granted. For me, there is nothing better in life than to love and let yourself be loved and that includes, most importantly, loving yourself. It's with this warmth and softness in my heart that I head into the uncertainty of 2009. What more could I ask for?
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