Year 2020 is at the ‘train station’

Suddenly, the cathedrals are filled to the brim; all of a sudden, the mosques are ‘invaded’ by those who never visited them twelve months before. We constantly assume that access to the bounties of the Almighty can be likened to the computer key board- ‘press and enter’. We indulge ourselves in the empty thought that we can harvest where we did not sow; that we can be enrobed with honour despite the iniquitous life that we live.

Thus there they go on the night of the 31st of December searching for the “face” of He whose Will they have abandoned for twelve months. There they go making New Year resolutions. I ask Oscar Wilde exactly what New Year resolutions means. He says “good resolutions are simply checks that men draw on a bank where they have no account.” How could you insert your credit card into an ATM machine in the knowledge your account is in the red and still hope to draw hundreds of currencies?

I say: exactly what is new in the New Year? This question agitated my mind early this morning. I wanted to know what is new in the new month, in the new day. I wanted to feel happy, like my neighbour, to be merry, to indulge in self-love. I sought to know exactly where the train carrying the year 2020 would empty its content, its happiness, its sadness. I wanted to know exactly how many of us witnessed its arrival in December 2019; I crave to know how many of us are at this station, the train station of 2020, waiting to bid it bye as it departs. Yes. 2020 is departing. But to where? Where is 2020 going? Could it be that contrary to our assumption, 2020 is nothing but a sign, a signifier, the signified being ourselves. We are actually the ones at the train station. We are the ones waiting to depart. We are the ones who have accumulated the nights and days; we are the ones who have exhausted three hundred and sixty five out of the days allocated to us when we began our journeys from our fathers’ loins into our mothers’ wombs before our arrival to this world. We are the ones at the train stations of life and living. We are the ones arriving even as others are departing.

Thus waiting to chance upon that magical moment when 2020 would depart and yield space to 2021 is like waiting to know exactly at what moment shall we pause to exhaust one breadth before taking another one. Trying to know exactly at what moment would the year 2020 begin its own journey to eternity is like trying to know exactly at what moment would the day mesh into the night. It is like trying to know exactly what colour or complexion has happiness and sadness. It is like seeking to experience the beatitude of the celestial space while we are still bogged down in the morass and in the insuperable conditions of the terrestrial.

Eventually, I came to the conclusion that nothing is new in the New Year except the ‘new’ attitude, the new habits and experience we invest it with. The New Year is therefore nothing but an open book given to us by He in whose hands lie the portents of the heavens and the earth. The New Year is nothing but the new breadth we take of life and give to life. Nothing is new in the New Year but the new visions we have of and for ourselves and our world. The New Year is neither a beginning nor an end for in the reckoning of His Majesty, the Almighty, there is no beginning nor an end. Ironically however, 2021 shall be, for some, the beginning of the end the same way 2020 marked the end for others. Thus to be alive to witness the “departure” of 2020, the year of COVID-19, is to be lucky and be privileged.

For it is not by our choice or decision we found ourselves on this train, the train of life; it is not by our choice or decision we are changing this train in order to ride in the train of 2020; it is not going to be by our choice or decision when we shall be made to disembark from the train of life. Brethren, let us therefore begin to live our lives fully and in the knowledge that we may arrive the ‘station’, the station of dis-embarkment sooner than we imagine. Let us equally work assiduously for life as if our destination is as distant as that of Prophet Nuh who lived for nothing less than nine hundred and fifty (950) years. The Prophet of Islam (s.a.w) says “work for this life as if you are never going to die; work for your hereafter as if your death certificate has been signed and only waiting to be delivered”.