Happy New Year!

Photo by Amy Shamblen on Unsplash

So how are you feeling? It is a new day, a new year and a new life if you want it to be. People always say life is short, I disagree, I think life is long. I think we have a lot left to live. How will you live this year?

Will you make resolutions that you will actually keep? Let's not call them resolutions, since that notion has resolved into nothing. Let's call them goals and objectives. What do you want to do with life? What do you want to do with you?

I want to meditate on what makes me happy on this day. What actually makes me happy. I know that sitting around watching tv and movies makes me happy. But that is just fun, what really makes me happy is my relationships with people. I want to renew and regard those relationships with people who are important to me.

I would also like to get to know new people. I think you can always have more friends. There are always people that you don't know yet who could enhance your life. I also want to live in the moment and live passionately. What does that mean, you ask? It means that I want to recognize that I am alive in this very moment and I want to do what makes my heart flutter.

I want to do things that make me sing. I want to dance this life away. I want my inner life to be a wonderful place, a place of peace and love and passion. Are you happy? Content? How is your inner life doing? First, worry about what is going on inside you before you tackle what is going on outside and around you.

Life often has little to do with what is happening and more with your state of mind. Speaking of state of mind, I had an interesting New Years Eve. I spend it with a couple friends and we ended up watching this very dark film about this true story of a woman who locks a girl in her basement and tortures her.

Don't ask me why we chose to watch this particular movie to ring in the new year. I think we were honestly not considering that maybe we should have picked something a little more uplifting. While we were watching it we saw how all these young people, a group of them, were torturing this young girl by burning her with cigarettes and some other unmentionable things.

Photo by Ian Espinosa on Unsplash

What was the most interesting aspect of this was that fact that there is this mass hysteria that happens to people when they are in a group. When the kids were asked later why they tortured her they had no real answer. They didn't know. My friend was suggesting that this is what happened in Germany during the Holocaust.

I saw this in a similar disturbing movie that was also a true story, called The Stanford Prison Experiment. It was a psychological experiment done on a group of men who were placed in a pretend prison, some were playing inmates while the others were playing the prison guards. They had to end the experiment after a few days because things got out of control.

The prison guards started to violently and sexually abuse the prisoners. It was a horrible portrayal of what human beings are capable of if left to their own devices. It makes me question this notion that I have that human beings are inherently good.

Mass mentality is how institutions are created. During slavery, racism and violence was an institution accepted by an entire society. We wonder how this happened and we think that we would not accept it if we were there at that time. But what are we accepting now? Our clothes, shoes, and phones are made in countries that use slave and child labor and we have no problem buying them.

You can ask me to support and even donate money to save children who are being used as slaves. But don't you dare ask me to give up my cell phone or my sweater from Macy's. In this new year, I want to reflect on how good I really am and how important that really is to me.

I believe in karma. I believe that everything you do comes back to you. But the problem with the karma theory is that the person that is being tortured, did they do something to deserve this pain in this life? Are we supposed to think they are getting what they deserve?

Are starving children in Africa in that situation because they did something unspeakable in a past life? In some kind of twisted way though, karma makes sense out of the wicked, random world. If people are getting what they deserve than it all doesn't seem so random. There can be a certain peace garnered from that thought.

However, this all sounds like we are blaming the victim. That they somehow deserved this. That is why we don't remember past lives probably. We cannot hold people accountable for who they were in a time we know nothing about. We must fight injustice for anyone, no one deserves that.

I feel like this whole discussion is rather negative for the fist day of the new year. Perhaps it does not fit the celebration of our day, but this is still a good day to reflect on oneself and the world around us. Good, bad or ugly the world is mysteriously complex.

I don't know how to resolve some of these conflicts. I just don't ever want to be a victim of mass mentality. I want to think my own thoughts. But are these even my own thoughts. Keep that in mind. Why are you thinking what you are thinking?

Also keep in mind in this new year that you and I can both become better people. I am good, but I could be better. I want to better myself. I want to never regret who I am at the end of this long life.

So salutations on this New Years Day! Make it a good one!

nina

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