Time is a Construct but Hope is Not

Wishing you a Hopy New Year

via GIPHY

I remember my first new year celebration.

It was with my friends in our apartment building — a chip-tasting party. We were four girls and there were four flavours of Lays Chips in the market at the time. Each of us got a ₹10 packet of a different flavour. We made a platter and tasted each flavour joyfully. For some reason, I preferred the reddish Spanish Tomato Tango over the golden Indian Magic Masala or the herbed American Cream & Onion. That was our dinner on new year's eve. I don’t think we waited until the clock struck twelve. We went home to our families who were blissfully asleep by 10 PM.

Maybe there were celebrations before and after the chip-tasting ceremony. There was certainly the memorable Y2K celebration at the cusp of 2000. But I craved warm company and meaningful celebrations on many thirty-firsts that followed. The reality never matched my expectations.

On 31st December 2016, I was home, and my family had obviously gone to bed by 10. Deflated by their lack of enthusiasm, I sat at the dining table, under the only lit tube light in the house. I was so disappointed. With life and loneliness.

When enough disappointment accumulates (as it had that year), there is usually a General Body Meeting of the heart and the mind. Something has to be done no, to make existence worthwhile again?

I picked up my bullet journal. I had started bullet journaling in November 2016. I made a list of what I had learned that year, and then a list of what I would like to do next year. It was no party, but I had stumbled upon a meaningful ritual.

The next year, I felt lonely again. So I made lists again. I also posted this poem on Instagram on 31st December 2017:

There I was trying to reframe new year’s itself.

New year celebration is a spectrum.

On one extreme, we have those who travel, plan parties, make resolutions for new habits, and commit to the ‘New Year New Me’ hope tropes. On the other extreme, there are those who question the need to do any of this, utterly cynical about the very idea of a new year, who wait with bated breath for people to give up on their new year resolutions come February. While one side believes in the redeeming potential of a fresh new year, the other side says time is a construct, and nothing exactly changes when a calendar does.

via GIPHY

I have skateboarded on this spectrum for the past few years. I’ve never made new year's resolutions, except the poems I chose as my resolutions last year. But I have always felt excited to write on the clean slate of a new year. I have questioned the need to overstuff our Decembers and concluded that time is indeed more than something we imagine being neatly batched in a factory into weeks, months, or years.

Where do I want to sit on this spectrum? 6 years ago, I wrote this on Facebook:

Hope as if hope underlies all other emotions. Kiss as if you're sharing hope, mouth to mouth, at leisure or in an emergency. Give your hope different colours. If it is blue, know the sky reflects it. If it is green in colour, let it be as widespread as football fields and as strong as spinach leaves, not just a tiny dot trapped in a small square. Hope for someone else, if there's none left for you.

I have written about hope during the pandemic. While I learn a lot from the scepticism around new year shenanigans, I would always choose to lean towards the hopeful celebrations, as silly and unrealistic as they can be. Cynicism is just not as appealing to me as it used to be.

I would rather hope on all new years’, not just the Gregorian one. Each Monday, each morning, each moment when I am aware of my freedom to begin again. Arbitrary as these beginnings are, hope is essential for living an individual and collective life. And we can hope without pressurizing and shaming ourselves if we don’t live up to our hope to a T.

So join me when I say, Hopy New Year. It sounds like a quieter, more reflective celebration, than Happy Near Year, which instantly reminds us of a dhinchak party and fireworks.

Hopy New Year friends, I’ll see you in 2023.

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Thank You readers and writers on Substack

I don’t want to end the year without saying thank you for your tremendous support this year. Each time you opened the email and read my words, I felt like working harder (and softer) to grow this space.

Thanks to the people at

Substack

for making this platform so superb for writers of all kinds. Their Recommendations feature is something I use these days to share my love for my favourite newsletters. Thanks to

Natasha Badhwar

, who was the first to recommend Evolving & Enough, and apart from being all kinds of awesome, sent some readers my way. Thanks to Nikita,

Swaati

,

Neena Verma

, Kartika, Alaknanda,

Dhruvi

,

Tracy O’Brien

for commenting generously, and Avinash, Krishnan, Sravanthi, and Narayani for replying via email.

Thank you to the brilliant

Tim Lott

for starting Poetry Corner, and appreciating the poem I posted in one of the rounds. Thanks,

aranya

for writing so lovingly about my old Bazaar poems in Poetly. Thanks to

Bhumika

for featuring my piece on breaks in her rich newsletter. Thanks,

Vasant Nath

for his sincere+warm newsletter and for sharing my curly hair piece in one of the editions. Thank you

C Lou Hamilton

for always encouraging me, and for featuring my music piece in the final post of ‘22 in Pen in Fist.

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An Invitation

I wish more of you creative-sensitive-funny-lovely people give Substack a chance. If you want to start a newsletter project, please let me know how I can help. Please write to hello.rajutai@gmail.com if you have specific/general doubts holding you back. Will be happy to support you.