A vantage of hope in a world of strife

The New Year divides time into the past and the future, a past that we think we know and a future that we apprehend is unknown and uncertain. There were miseries, setbacks and defeats in the year gone by in personal life, in the nation’s life, and in the life of the world outside our borders. There were also joys, victories, and things that made our day. Let us not dwell on them. When the sun set last evening, old and tired, the good and the bad went down with it, as they have always done since the first sun set on the earth. When the sun rose today, young and red, it brought new life, leavened with hope, and the future with it. It is human to hope and look ahead, and so we leave the midnight behind and look forward to the dawns in the making. 

A few months ago, we saw the earth through the eyes of a camera we sent to the moon. It showed bright lights and dark shadows, and patches of grey between them, scattered across an expanse of land, together providing a metaphor for our lives. The view didn’t show the maps we have made to divide our world, the blazes of war, or the waves of passion rising and retreating. There was no history but only a spread of the present. There was no sign of the violence we have wreaked on the earth. But we know we are deceived by the distance. We are coping with strife and war, we are weighed down by our past and its prejudices, and we have mapped the world and our minds into countries and compartments. It is a world divided by and among ourselves. There is poverty, suffering, crime and disease. The reality, we know, overwhelms the image.

But the view from the moon is an ideal, and being human, we should know that not all ideals are unreal. We aspire to live in the ideal world one day, if not in this year, perhaps in this century, or in the next millennium, and certainly many New Years away. Like the moon, the New Year gives us a vantage point from where we can see the future and get a view of ourselves from the outside, without being clouded by our prejudices and disappointments. That opportunity comes every year when we look at the bag of misfortunes and the bouquet of joys that the passing year brought, and we look forward with hope as we renew our faith in life. Today, we do that again.