Happy new year pull your ear...

Welcoming in the new year. It's like getting ready for a first date.

You get all excited and in preparation for the significant day. You preen and pose and scrub and shave and diet and mentally rehearse interesting topics of conversations to entice and to make your date think you're not too dumb yet not too intelligent, and pretty enough.

My usual welcoming of the new years in the past, have been pretty much like my usual first dates, I was always unshaved and unscrubbed and un-dieted and very much unprepared.

Well this time round, it was different.

I have been pretty much preparing for 2007 for a while now, maybe it's because 2006 has been a less than satisfactory year.

For the last few months now, I've been thinking long and hard about things; about myself, my life, my relationships, my work, my past, and also my future.

It was a long and hard process, this attempt to honestly and carefully review and revalue my life of 29 years. (Because one can't just think about 2006 in isolation you see. The things that happened to me in 2006 were part and parcel, and many times, a result of what happened to me previously.)

It was a roller-coaster ride as I re-looked my life. Some parts were painful, others humiliating. Many a times, as I remembered things, I cringe at my naivete and stupidity sometimes. (I think it was at this point that I sometimes send what my friends say, wierd sms-es to them, in order to rectify a possible wrong or misunderstanding.)

While it's useful to re-think the things of my life, it sometimes brought me to a severe low when I realised how much of my life I've wasted, how many friendships I've taken for granted, how many people I've lost in my almost three decades. There were many "what ifs", and "supposing" this and that, and "if onlys".

What if I had taken this path instead of the other?

Supposing I had listened instead of being so stubborn?

If only I had apologised?

But that is now all past and gone. No point thinking "what ifs", and "supposing" and "if onlys". You blew it. Deal with it. And move on.

I blew it in so many things. So many of these I don't even want to think about or talk about.

I dealt with it today, the last day of 2006. Once and for all, I packed all the excess baggage together, and hoisted it out into the metaphorical sea of forgetfulness.

And I'm moving on to a great new 2007.

I'm excited. Because I know that 2007 is going to be a great year. I'm not sure what and why and how yet, but I just know.

Next year, this time, I'll be blogging about all the great things that happened. I may not be able to accomplish all that I want to do for 2007, but I want to be able to at least accomplish some. And more importantly, I want to make sure I will no longer live a life of regrets of "should haves", "could haves", and "would haves".

For once, I'm going to be free to enjoy a new year. The old has gone, the new has come.

Here's to 2007!

Happy new year and pull your ears everybody!