As another year comes to an end, I’m compelled to reflect upon the aesthetic of time. How short life seems to be, from birth till now - a mere blink. At once I find myself overwhelmed by an acute sense of self-awareness, possibly because the opposite would mean complete and total paralysis. Seeing the world in a new light has made it easier for me to let go of things. Trivial things that I once thought to be important. For nothing matters more than that which lives inside us. Our only true North.

I've watched people get consumed chasing things. Chase them so closely. So madly. So completely. I love Fitzgerald for his unflappable belief in love, so dear to his heart, that he would allow nothing to stand in his way. But I love the idea of it. For the past can't be relived. It can't be recreated. And we can't save the ones we love. No matter how much we try or want to. What haunts our dreams and soothes our souls cannot enter the realm of the waking - for it can stray us from our paths. We have to gather but the breadcrumbs of memories along the way and fill our pockets with with little bits of hope. So when things get rough, we can reach back into our pockets and remember them as they were. Imperfect. Impermanent. Incomplete. And yet, unspeakably beautiful in their pure and absolute transience.

In Tao philosophy, people understand this. They believe in accepting life as it is presented to them. Finite. Unfinished. Imperfect. The beauty lies in the fact that each moment is unique and will never be the same again.

It seems that most people today are running away from something. Looking for things without instead of within. The hardest lesson we all face is universal in nature. A shared truth. A truth we try and deny with worldly distractions. With pills and drinks and parties and friends and and rationalizations.

Perhaps Proust was right when he said "The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.".