alan little’s weblog

new year thoughts

6th January 2005 permanent link

Some belated New Year Thoughts. Just back from our visit to Maria’s mother in Russia, via a long day, a couple of painful hours of which were spent sitting on the apron at a remote airstrip on the Russian steppes while attempts were made, with varying degrees of success, to de-ice parts of the plane, while our toddler went berserk with boredom on our laps. (Luckily for us he fell asleep the moment the plane actually took off, and didn’t wake up until we were on approach into Frankfurt)

Samara International Airport

Maria’s mum’s apartment is an internet-free zone in which I don’t speak the language, so I had a lot of time to Think About Stuff – generally in a happy and positive way, I had a great time, pictures to follow – mostly along the lines of how very deeply content I am with where my life seems to have landed up right now.

Of course there are still things I haven’t done that I wish I had but probably never will. But (a) it would be absurd to regret any of the choices I have made up to this point, because they have led to me being who I am and being with Maria and Jack, and were therefore obviously the right choices. And (b) I am old enough to be at peace with the fact that whatever happens you can’t do everything you will ever want to do and in any case, contentment is about what’s going on inside your head and not about what’s going on outside. (As I had occasion to point out to Maria last week when she was having difficulty believing that I was quite happy spending a day in and around a bureaucrat’s office in a dingy Russian provincial town). Nevertheless, and taking it as a given that I’m quite happy with what’s going on in this lifetime, but assuming for the sake of argument that there might be others and that if there are, there seems to be no obvious reason why they should have to be arranged in what would appear to be us to be chronological order, a New Year’s List with a slight difference: a To-Do List for other lifetimes:

• Hear the premier performances of Monteverdi’s Vespers, the Saint Matthew Passion and the Eroica
• Learn to play a musical instrument myself – tabla or electric bass
• Trek the roof of the world with Eric Shipton
• Discover lost cities in the Taklamakan Desert
• Race the Dakar rally – but back when it was a relatively obscure event done by a handful of loonies with modified production vehicles, not the Big Money circus with works teams, real racing cars and wall-to-wall helicopters and TV cameras it has become. (Note: The Dakar rally was about the only thing I understood on Russian TV last week)
• oh, er, oops, and: do lots of yoga, meditate loads and thus come to realise that stuff like all of the above doesn’t matter and outward things can’t bring real contentment (etc. etc.), thus becoming free from the Wheel Of Suffering and not needing to suffer further reincarnations in order to learn this basic lesson. But not just yet.

all text and images © 2003–2008