Year Reflections

The hotel opened up like a delightful grand maze. The colonial architecture only fortified the idea. With just enough imagination I managed to melt away the obvious signs of modernity and feel the same warm distinct night of the Conquistador roaming his hallways. The metamorphosis is instant and unsettling. It takes a certain amount of concentration though to ignore the primal shouts and whoops of the party-goers I arrived with. The clock was slowly winding down for the year and in the back of my mind I know it is only seven days more for 2007. The leap seems inconsequential. They always do.
What is the truly frightening aspect are the internal rages that fueled the year. At which point I wonder, did the Conquistador challenge the same neurosis? Was the self he fought greater? More simple? The question slithers me into the skin of Ghenis Khan, conqueror of many lands. The words he discovered thousands of years before echo loudly in the artificial Colonial Mansion that was really just a hotel. After achieving his monumental campaign throughout the Asian continent and knowing the riches of the great kingdoms the Khan could only scribble on a pillar, “I turn to simplicity; I turn again to purity.” I wonder: Can I achieve this? What would it take? I may spend years chasing that dream, coming closer and closer only to realize that time has no regard for my quest and interests.
So 2007 becomes 2008 and I mark it with everyone else: 2008, only seven days away. Compiling a list of my accomplishments and failure is cruel and mind-wrenching. How do you explain spiritual resurgence? Can you simply mark-down new found strength? The deed is hard, unbearably hard. No, only history makes sense in the soft light of the Mexican night, roaming hallways like a ghost while your friends rot away their liver with liquor. History and the forces that drive it and the numerous failures and the numerous successes are all that matter. But why lie? There is more and I know it. I know that the year brought something new and that sorting the mess out is a daunting task. A list obviously won’t cut. So I sit and compose a story, a poem, a long winded memoir; grasping at some central idea or thought that could piece this year together.
All that comes is a phrase: I eat, sleep, shit, and the rest is guess work. Just that phrase, a dim-witted one at best. There is so much to put; lessons, new adventures, new challenges … even the tears. Like the success of my first scuba dive or the haunting visible deterioration of my Grandparents. You can not quantify or convey it fully. These things are personal and, in light of the sand, minor. Instead what erupts is a wounded idea about Conquistadors, Genghis Khan, and the redemption of a pillar. That is what drives my year-end reflection. Ugh, how serious and moribund. And finally after all that walking, with an empty bottle of beer, I decide to sit down. I find a grandiose patio that retains a sensuous charm. And just there, on the edge, overlooking the vast obsidian ocean is a chair. I sit down and I realize: The chair is soaking wet.
So I laughed. Here I was considering myself so grand and compelling when it took a cosmic joke to remind me I was never special. I had a wet ass. That was my year, all of it: an endless search for a wet chair.
The lesson is the laughing. You need it. When you do laugh, at yourself first, you can relax and pay attention to the beauty. This is a sensation history knows, the simplicity of watching a beautiful scene, whatever that may be. In this case; a black night, a restless ocean, and a lonely wet chair I spent a year searching for.