Moving forward

Every morning, when I wake again under the pall of the sky, I feel that for me it is New Year’s Day. That is why I hate these New Year’s Days with a fixed date, which turn life and the human spirit into a commercial concern, with its consumption and its balance sheet and its forecast of expenses and income for the old and new management. -- Gramsci

I am writing this from one of my favorite spots in my house, surrounded by trees and plants, on New Year’s morning, two thousand nineteen.

Two thousand eighteen, what a year! Yesterday I read on social media how several acquaintances were begging for the “shitty year” to be over, and by one of those strange, ironic coincidences, on my phone’s shuffle playlist I heard a song by Ervin Drake, performed by Frank Sinatra, titled “It Was a Very Good Year” (a romantic song that looks back on old loves).

Last year had a bit of everything for me: valuable, beloved people left us, and I saw friends go through a rough time, others improve their lives, and some achieve great success. Personally I had some very hard and stressful moments, and others that were tremendously comforting and happy. Toward the end, several achievements, closures and successful results. But, as a slogan from the industry I work in goes, “past performance is no guarantee of future results”.

Moving forward

On the one hand, I agree with what Gramsci says in his “Odio il Capodanno”: every morning we should feel that it is New Year’s Day. That invites us not to give up, to keep fighting for our goals, wishes and aspirations.

In The Ghost Rider, Neil Peart writes:

• Pack up all those phantoms
  Shoulder that invisible load
  Keep on riding north and west
  Haunting that wilderness road
  Like a ghost rider
  Keep on riding north and west
  Then circle south and east
  Show me beauty, but there is no peace
  For the ghost rider*

And he means that we should take our past like a backpack and move forward in our life, however we can, even with those ghosts on our backs.

But let’s move forward, because if we move forward the shadows begin to disappear, as we free ourselves from the dead weight life leaves us with:

*There’s a shadow on the road behind
There’s a shadow on the road ahead
Nothing can stop you now

Sunrise in the mirror\

• *Lightens that invisible load\
• *Riding on a nameless quest\
• *Haunting that wilderness road
  
  Like a ghost rider
  
  Just an escape artist\
• *Racing against the night\
• *A wandering hermit\
• Racing toward the light

We move toward the light, whatever that means for each one of us.

Happy New Year, friends. Don’t stop moving forward.