Kids.

We're born innocent. Until birth, we only know of the warmth of our mothers, and muffled sounds of the outside world. It's not until we're exposed to various realities over the course of what they called 'growing up' do we being harsher, more cruel, and more similar to the people who we once did not understand.

There's something about childhood that gets me. In their world, the greatest problem is how to coerce mum into buying them an ice-cream. They don't need to worry about where their next meal is going to come from, whether they'll have a roof over their head the next week, or what they're going to do with their life, if they'll be able to do what they want with it even. At least they shouldn't have to. Their priority is growing, observing and learning from the world around them.

Chocolate Shop in Whangarei

Perhaps that's why children bring us so much joy - they remind us of more simple times.

Shoes.

Our feet carry us, but shoes are the buffer between our feet and the gravel, stones and sand. I have a weird sentimentality when it comes to shoes. Some of you may be aware that I enjoy buying clothes, maybe too much so for a guy. However, I have a very different attitude to shoes. I won't buy new shoes until the ones I am wearing have fallen apart. I can remember every time I have bought shoes since I started being sentimental about them, and there is a good 2 year gap between each time!

To me, shoes carry so many memories with them. They have gotten soaked at Splash Mountain in Los Angeles, climbed to the Tian Tan Buddha Statue in Hong Kong, dodged the Hot Spring Monkeys in Japan, been there when I watched a surgery, walked on the cobblestones streets in Slovenia. They have crossed borders, carried dust from one continent to another. They, to me, are physical reminders of where I've been, and where I will go.

The real things.

So it's the end of 2011. Such an intense, and life-changing or perhaps life-revealing year - the most so far. I feel like I figured out more about myself in this one year, than in the 16 before combined. I saw the world, I met inspirational people, I overcame challenges and discovered better music. I like to think that I came out of it braver, more self actualized, more aware of the world around me.

"The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody'd be different. The only thing that would be different would be YOU. Not that you'd be so much older or anything. It wouldn't be that, exactly. You'd just be different, that's all."


So many things are the same around us as they were at the beginning of 2011. The same unpredictable Auckland weather, the same hope for the year to come. And yet everything is so different. So bring on 2012, it's going to be so different, but really, not so much.

In the past week I was at Hot Water Beach, camping with 21 other school friends. It rained constantly until new year's day, which we spent at Whangamata, and on January the 2nd, the weather was beautiful. All the rain made us appreciative of sun's rays. Over this week, I realized how we are forever connected, forever distracted from reflection by something insubstantial happening in our lives. This past week was not only a great time with friends, but a great time to spend a little time by myself. Getting up that little bit later, reading by myself in the tent, making my own MiGoreng.

So new years resolutions for this year:
1) To keep it (life and myself) real, while I venture into University
2) To NOT procrastinate. I'd get so much more done. - I don't know how realistic this is though..

Apologies for the jumbled post. Hopefully the ideas that have been bouncing around within my head have been conveyed to you.

Happy new year, and best of luck for 2012