Why we need a new year NOW!

Suddenly at the end of this year, I'm tired. For the last few days, I've been hoping the year would flip over fast. Perhaps I have been hoping, naively, for a clean slate, for a happiness trigger.
I think we need that now: A happiness trigger.
Though I did try to keep it out, this post is not going to be a clean slate. However much I would like it to be. It is my hangover, my albatross, my modern rime.
If you are thinking tsunami, you are thinking right. But I'm also thinking Kumbakonam, before that. First, fire and then, water. Elemental displeasure.
There has been a great deal of sorrow this year, especially in the last part of this year. Two gruesome tragedies, distinguished for me by the fact of my participation in them. If bodies charred out stiff in Kumbakonam, they floated in the tsunami. Worse still, the survivors' sorrow knocks up your insides, refuses to let you sleep and makes you feel so irrelevant in the scale of things, so inadequate for being unable to do more. If you are doing anything at all.
There are a lot of lessons from each tragedy, I'd be a fool to ignore them. Not lessons on where to build houses and how to maintain schools - they are there too, but in the most crushing calamity, life doles out the most reassuring balm:
THIS TOO SHALL PASS, for the rest of us, spectators, who surge to reach out.
Amen.

Happy New Year, folks! May the Force be with us!