What 2009 Means

With new hope and new resolutions, I began 2009 with optimism, excitement, apprehension, and a twinge of fear. Optimism from the idea of a new beginning as with all new years and excitement at what this particular year would bring and apprehension towards the uncertainty of life suspended between the hands of time. Life really happened this year - with the ending of high school at the moments I wished it wouldn’t and with the beginning of college at the moments I wished it would – it was a good kind of change, but a darker undertow to the happiness and the laughter rose subtly and discreetly.

It seems my life has always been a chase, which is ironic because I absolutely loathe running for all the healthiness and fitness that it represents. But I’ve always been chasing after something: first it was an A in history class, and then it was a 5 on my AP exam, and a decent score on the SAT, along with good students to tutor, a passing grade in Physics, a perfected group project, and getting into shape (though I concluded life was too short to waste on diets), and the goal to end all goals: college. After all, how many years had I spent as a child in piano class, Chinese school, at the library, and buried in “enrichment” workbooks to get to this point? And so, once the high school graduation ceremony was done and over with, once the celebrations abated and diplomas were received, time stopped. College had been achieved – what was there left to chase? Summer and vacations with no assignments and no studying was a novel and welcome feeling. The old burden was removed, yet a new one replaced it. A feeling of lost listlessness replaced the feeling of running in a rat race, and I honestly can’t say that feeling lost is better than feeling stressed. Even when college arrived in a flurry of paper boxes, a red brick wall, Dining Dollars, and football, the burden of stress was only a façade, behind which the feeling of being lost lurked at every corner of my life. College was the dream, and unlike high school, four years of college will end in a question mark. Once high school had been over, it was definite that college was in the future. But once college is over, what would the dream be then? The goals are blurred and fuzzy and vague. There are always the standard dreams: find a job, earn a comfortable living, get married, have children, find “fulfillment” in life, etc. But what exactly do those dreams mean? Because these dreams aren’t defined and because life right now hangs in some kind of twisted balance, I can’t define my purpose. I can’t define what I’ve got to do, what I have to chase, in order to achieve the dream because I don’t know what the dream is. This year past year, I’ve lost the focus and the direction and the order that I so crave in my life.

Next year, I want it all back – the determination, the focus, and the motivation. I want to chase something, anything, again.

But most of all, I want to figure out what exactly it is I’m chasing.