Plans for the year end changed, and how!

What a Day!

Have you ever wondered how badly the morning of Christmas Eve could start? Here is what happened to us. I was banking on having a long beauty sleep. The previous two mornings I had got up earlier than usual, as I had to get ready for my morning holiday job. There was hardly any time to have a protracted bath, or a lazy breakfast, forget about doing a little bit of exercise or yoga. Nowadays, due to the winter cold, I've almost given up on morning and evening walks, and bicycling for toning the abdominal muscles.

To turn everything topsy turvy, the alarm rang at an odd unexpected hour, too early for today. It went off at the time I had set for yesterday and the day before, which was at 5:30 am. For some, 5:30 is not that early, but for me it is. My normal time to leave bed is around 7 am, so 5:30 is when I am fast asleep.

So when the alarm rang, I thought it was something else, in someone else's house. Only when my Equal Half shouted for me to leave the bed, I realised it was serious! It was the water heater. Our heater might have exploded. Soon the entire apartment would be flooded with water, and then make way into the floors below us. That would be a mess, not to mention the insurance claims that the down floor people would slap on us.

So it started with a dysfunctional water heater. I made emergency arrangements to catch the overflow with cups, bowls, cloths, sponges, and fill it into a bucket. Anything to avoid major bills. But there was no hot water to wash face first thing in the morning.
So, when Christmas starts on such a bleak , what could we expect? For some reason, our friends who were to visit us for Christmas did not turn up. And we cancelled the Las Vegas trip for the time being. Everything was going wrong.
As the day progressed, some red wine elevated our mood. Another bright idea flashed in our mind. What about Palm Springs? Maybe, we were to go to Palm Springs for the year end, after all?

Maybe Las Vegas

Some time ago, I wrote about our major dilemma about where to go for the year end celebrations. There should be a way to bid adieu to 2009 and welcome 2010. The next year, everyone is saying, will bring in major changes, and these changes would be good ones. So, there is a need to doubly make the new year feel welcome amidst us.

Always I feel weird when an old year comes to an end. Especially the last few hours, when I feel sad that one stretch of my life has come to an end, but I am also waiting for the new year to begin. I'm sure everyone feels similar emotions, when waiting becomes a torture. We just want old things to end, although we feel sad, but we want new things to begin.

These cycles of years, seasons, days, months, weeks have a beginning and an end. Everything earthly has a start and a finish, I would say, and all of you would agree on that, I feel. This is what marks our life. This is what differentiates us from inanimate things. Life – that is what it is all about.

And at the end of one year, when a new year is on the horizon, wanting to celebrate it in a big way is not a bad idea at all. These are not things that do not come again and again. The moments come, and then go away. They go for ever.

It is about catching hold of the moment, even if for a moment only. Then then go back to it later in the mind, repeatedly. Moments live only in our memories. But for it to be in the memory, it has to be lived and experienced at least once. Life is all about living the moments, then reliving them in our minds again and again. As long as we have memory, we are alive. That is why diseases like Alzheimer's is so dreaded. If we don't have memory, it is like death.

To have an enriched memory, to have great moments, we've thought of making a trip to Las Vegas. We'd welcome the new year, 2010, in Las Vegas, in all probability (that is, if we get hotel reservation). That would be a different place from our residence, and a different memory. Hope we're making the right decision.