what to say, really? it's january 4th, 2008.
At times like this I am glad that I have this archive of words; looking through the past four years of resolutions makes me feel that 4 years is simultaneously a long and short time; a substantial amount of passage, yet not quite with the status of 'formative' -- just under a demi-decade..
Do I have any resolutions? Here they are:
1. Whatever it is, if I unconsciously resist it, then do it.
2. Attempt fulfillment and completeness today, not tomorrow.
Also, one of my resolutions from last year:
3. "resolution: to be more like the kid I was when I was sixteen. angrier, happier, emotional, idealistic, more motivated, more hard-working, endlessly voracious about knowledge, carefully opinionated, and above all excited, anxious to face the quote-world-unquote, to find some mystical underlying virtue in this all, convinced and moving. Perhaps -- to be more straight, more true, more properly fletched."
Here's part what I wrote last year, leaving Korea on New Year's Day.
Having done this oscillation as much as I have, spread thin over two areas like the ghosted-out-doubled prongs of a vibrating tuning fork, it still surprises me to realize that every return back is as... meaningful as ever, if anything. Meaningful is a good word, meaning-full, full of whatever there is that might be determined by endless ruminations on buses, walking invariably dynamic streets, underground subways seen with eyes growing more foreign then native...
I suppose I'll say a million things before I find the core of what I really want to exhale, but this is part of it: that people change, countries change, I've changed and no longer feel at home at a place I used to claim as mine. To articulate the sad and perhaps obliquely spectacular fact that homes slip out of designation, mentalities and identities slide from place to place -- and that whenever that happens, it should be worthwhile to mourn the passing and celebrate the new formation of a self, simultaneously, a cherishing-and-grieving-of-movement, without regret but with endless heaps and amounts of retrospection, globules-of-tears-like in their overflowing nature.
This is me, myself, with the knowledge that I have changed, Korea has changed, we're no longer fit for each other anymore, or rather, we're no longer with each anymore. But the result isn't a kind of warm-hearted eyes-looking-back-over-shoulder-turning-neck gesture saying 'oh, that was good, those days', a soft and fuzzy reminiscence cuddly in its passing -- it's not incidental-hearted, but a deliberate and spontaneous laughter at time, for Time, an oh look how we got here, look what got us here. Are we all not, us all, moving, changing, hopelessly small against Uncle Change, usually unable to comprehend the degree with which we change, move, slide from time to time, grow and wither? And that all too sadly it's only when we come out of it, leave the state we were, that only when time solidifies after separation and shows itself post facto can we realize how blind we were to this changing and passing, and how we will continue to be, so unfailingly...