© cjggbella
Our campus newspaper recently ran one of their questionaires, interviewing random people to answer random questions. For some reason or other, I've often recognised some of the interviewees, but I've never been interviewed (lucky journalists!). One of the recent questions was thus: Do you think the world will end in 2012? Only one person answered in the affirmative. I wonder if they really mean it, and what it must feel like if they do.
I made one resolution last year that, to my surprise, I eventually kept. And by "eventually", I do not mean I ever kept it in a thunderclap kind of way. On the contrary, it took many months and contradictions for that resolution to sink in, to any significant extent. But now that it has, I'm not sure I like it. I'll not go into what it was, but just the same, I suppose I'll be careful about what I resolve now.
2011 was an interesting year for me. I despise the term "self-discovery", but that's what it was, more or less. I find that I've changed completely and still haven't changed at all. There were a lot of influential moments, gloomy ones and glorious ones. Some years are like series of adventures, others are like series of doldrums and highlights. For me, 2011 was the latter. It felt like The Old Man and the Sea--rolling and drifting through the sea, and then all of a sudden, a marlin-fish charges head-first into the sky, and you're sitting in the rowboat, shaking and grinning and maybe crying, holding onto the fishing line which is knifing into your hands until they bleed.
© Nik Wilets
I always liked that movie. Sometimes the world is like that.
As a child, I was always scared by the marlin. But that's why I watched it. It was hard to feel sympathetic towards the old man, Santiago, until he first saw and caught his fish. Then I was there, helping him reel it in, fighting off the sharks, and regretting its loss.
That's the brilliance of the story, really. Santiago's best and worst moments of his life are when he catches the marlin. And the marlin doesn't stand for life's milestones, necessarily, at least not in the typical sense. I think the marlin stands for those truly life-changing moments that only each individual knows about, times when we're alone at sea, with our human frailty, human nature, and God. Sometimes those are joyful moments, sometimes miserable ones, and sometimes a little of both.
That they affect us emotionally is understood, but the question is, how do they affect our character? And that is why I'd repeat what I said before--I'm glad I don't have to decide the future or worry about what happens in 2012. I wouldn't want to face the marlin of 2012, but there are times when you have to in order to learn anything. Even things about yourself.
© Jason Mrachina
