Happy New Year one and all! (: It's been a fruitful and eventful year all the same and whether you have been voluntarily or unwillingly (although I fail to see how that can be so) following the footsteps of my journey through this blog, thank you for accompanying me through the course of our adventure and here's to a more exhilarating beginning for us all!

For my new found friend and confidante:

Going past the formalities, it's safe to say the majority of us aren't prepared for the advent of another new year. Cliched axioms promises that new beginnings often bring glad tidings and fresh opportunities to discover more about ourselves. Granted, everybody harbors the same innate fears and we all long to return to the past, to relive even the few miserable moments we had to endure, because we have been put to that trial and we have bested it. We are comfortable with the pursuit of familiarity, desperate to loom in our comfort zones and bask in the warm light and frigid winter likewise that we know we will pull through, simply because, we already had.

No doubt, therein lies a dearth of evidence that the year ahead will be better than the many grueling ones we have survived but the ineffable mystery that a new beginning suppresses tempts you despite its choking grasp.

We always look at our shortcomings; the sole victory that slipped past our hands, the times we simply want to let go and give up given the bleak nature of our future, the desperation of the weak and crippled to fall into eternal demise, never to be reminded of the horrors in falling down.

And yet, we are only human.

But remember what I told you, it is our imperfections that makes us perfectly human.

We live our lives with regrets because we only look upon our past as mistakes we shall not wrought again in the future. Rather, our past is saddled with crimes that we have undertaken and still live to tell the tale. That time you took a leap off the second storey of a building and survived the falling crash. The time the world started imploding and collapsing on you but you found renewed hope in the individuals around you.

The time when you wanted to give up

and you didn't

A year goes on.

You wanted to let go

but you didn't.

Two years on.

The going gets tough,

the tough gets going.

Seventeen going on eighteen.

The world is still the same bleak, treacherous and cold planet you never remembered.

But it is populated by beings that bring warmth and light to the shadows of our nightmare.

The last time winter came, you remembered not the storming blizzard that stained the glass panels of your vision, but the friends you were suffocating with, with grasps so tight on each other there is hardly room to breathe. And still love gives you hope.

We all have a dream, built as the castle on the clouds, and we all see ourselves as the protagonist of a miserable tale. And no doubt, you are not wrong on that.

But you must always remember that a sad tale is a constant reminder of the blessings that we have and should cherish. The cold, a symbol that the sun is the bringer of life. The blistering heat, the recognition for the cool and calm nature that we never deserved.

So go on dreaming and never stop dreaming. Our failures are but bricks we can utilize to fortify our castle walls.

And one day when you are ready, you will enter that castle on the cloud and

dream the dream you've always waited for.

It's ok to be idealistic, as long as you keep it real. It's ok to be realistic, as long as it's in your dreams.