New year as a symbol for the spring of life: strive to change, try to be better

The birth of Jesus came a week before the death of the old year and the birth of the new in its stead. This got me thinking about the long river, the cháng jiāng, where days, months, and years come and go without missing a tick or a tock, carrying people along with them on the fast-flowing current of no return. Indeed, people, like you and me, each in his own time, come and go.

So it begs the question: Which is more important—the beginning or the end? It’s been said that our beginning is our end and, of course, it’s always good to do things right, right from the get-go. However, men are, by nature, propensity, and orientation, intrinsically fallible, gullible, and corruptible. The squeaky-clean shoes we wore at the start of our journey invariably and inevitably become dusty, dirty, or mud-splattered in the end.

While it is good to once in a while look back to where we’ve been, it is even more important for us to live for the moment and to seize the day by its swift-running feet, to come up from the depths of the abysmal arroyos of the past and stand upon the bluff of the present to get an overview and wider perspective of the landscape before us—the future—using the vantage point of hindsight.

It doesn’t matter where we’re at, where we’ve been, whom we met, or what possessions we have amassed to the extent of embarrassment. It is what we do or what we did—our very deeds—that will determine and define who we are and who we’ve been. Our last and final acts and actions are what the people we left behind will long remember and talk about as we go the way of no return. It is how many lives we have touched, influenced, and illuminated in a good and positive way. It is how much of ourselves we give up or give away that counts so that others may be developed and improved, enabled, and ennobled. These are the things that will tell whether you’ve been good or bad. So live well and die well.

The leaves of the trees of northern snow countries in autumn turn the warm colors of yellow, orange, and red and afterward shed, just as the calendar sheds its leaves of days. The seasons turn; days and nights by turns come and go and come again. As people do. But no matter what our life feels like for us, no matter where we are right now—starting on a journey or nearing the end of one—we must strive to change for the better, try to be better. The next version of ourselves should not just be older but also wiser, more giving, and compassionate. Otherwise, we would just be living our days without living. When it’s my time to enter the ground and cross the River Styx, let me, dear God, not realize, too late, that I have never lived at all.

The old year is dead; night has ended. Day is about to begin, and soon it will be morning again. Over the smell of acrid smoke from the fireworks drifts the ineffable scent of blossoms of an unseen and unnamed bush from across the fence. Two days ago I shaved, and already I’m gray in some parts of my face where hair, insidious as cut and clipped grass, is quietly growing out and growing up. I know it. I feel it. Spring, by the grace of God, is about to begin within me!

Antonio Calipjo Go