Life's About-Turns

Funny how life is. One moment everything is going your way and you think you have it all sewn up... health, job, love, relationships, popularity, worldly success, in short you’re riding the crest of a wave, you’re unbeatable and indestructible; and the next, that same wave is engulfing you and your world and everything begins to unravel and come apart around you... your health begins to flag, you lose your job or work becomes scarce, you split up with your significant other, friends drift away, family rows break out, and you can see your life going down the pan. Funny how life is, eh?

The thing is that life itself is very precarious and our happiness actually hangs by a thread. It does not take much to change our fortunes, whether for the better or for the worse. The magnitude of the change required to take us from success to failure in life may be likened to the magnitude of the change required in climatic temperatures to bring natural disasters upon humanity: tiny. And it is when we are at our strongest that we may suffer the biggest setback and the heaviest fall. When we stand at the pinnacle of achievement and are the happy recipients of the best that life has to offer, there is only one way to go if we should slip or misfortune strike us: down.

So as we go into a new year it would be well for all of us to bear in mind that fortunes can change at a drop of a hat in spite of our best efforts to keep on an even keel and avoid stormy seas. Even more importantly, we should not be so intoxicated by short-lived success as to believe in our own immortality. The great and the good have come and gone over the centuries, never to return, and are but a blip in the passage of time. The most successful, the wealthiest, the most celebrated, the most adored and feted man or woman, will grow old, feeble, and die one day... that is, if illness or accident does not claim him first. In this we are all equal before God, Nature, the Giver of Life and Death.

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The comments I make here are not meant to be taken as a counsel of despair, nor as a sermon of righteousness, but as an acknowledgment of the way things are, and, this said, I now wish everyone a very happy and prosperous...

New Year

Carry on blogging, folks!