New Year’s Musings
I AIM to stay fine in 2K9 – that’s my resolution for this New Year.

While I intend to stay fine in the physical slim and trim sense, I also plan to be fine in the feeling good and better sense of the word.

For me, 2K9 should be like a fine wine – sip, sip, savour the flavour and feel fine. (The other kind of ‘fine wine’ is also divine!).

Feeling fine in 2K9 is the kind of feeling I think should prevail across the land and even further afield in the face of all the feeling bad feelings that sometimes threaten to overwhelm us.

And that’s why I like parts of The Optimist’s Creed someone emailed me the other day.

It says – “Promise yourself to make all your friends feel that there is something in them.

To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true. 

To think only of the best, and expect only the best.”

And feeling fine and staying fine become all the more important when you consider what’s on the downside.

Amid the worries about global warming, some experts are predicting this will be one of the hottest years around the world in record.

British climate scientists said 2009 is set to be one of the top-five warmest on record.

The average global temperature for 2009 is expected to be more than 0.4 degrees celsius above the long-term average, despite the continued cooling of huge areas of the Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as La Nina.

That would make it the warmest year since 2005, according to researchers at the British Met Office, who say there is also a growing probability of record temperatures after this year.

Currently the warmest year on record is 1998, which saw average temperatures of 14.52 degrees celsius – well above the 1961-1990 long-term average of 14 degrees celsius.

Warm weather that year was strongly influenced by El Nino, an abnormal warming of surface ocean waters in the eastern tropical Pacific.

At home, the weather officials say the heavy rains will run into March-April, following the record-breaking rainfall over this Christmas season.

The toll from the global financial meltdown is also going to spread wider, the experts say.

But amid all the gloom and doom trumpeted by those who seem to revel only in the dark tidings, I am buoyed by the optimism I have seen bubbling around with the dawn of the New Year.

The din and startling flashes from firecrackers and stupendous squibs overwhelmed the woes of the Old Year and rocketed in the New Year with hopes for better days ahead.

And as if in answer to the prayers, the rains held off for a while although showers and overcast conditions hung around as a stark reminder of what has been and could be.

The Christmas decorations, strings of fairy lights, bright multi-coloured bulbs, small, medium and large plastic Santas dancing in the wind, glowing trees at night even from homes and business places, sometimes in a sea of water from the heavy rains, were amazing.

It seemed that shoppers were everywhere in the days leading to Christmas and the crowds gathered in nightclubs, churches, on the streets and elsewhere to ring out the Old Year and ring in the New Year were like cool, refreshing wine to a soul long stranded in a desert of troubles.

Someone came up to me in a nightclub so crowded that there was hardly standing room and asked “Are you going to write about this?”

“Write about what?” I responded.

And he said, “This man – so many different people all enjoying themselves!”

I was in fine company, having a good time enjoying myself and couldn’t argue with the guy.

The odds of me staying fine in 2K9 looked good before but soared with the dawn of the New Year.

I hope it’s the same for all of us.

Happy New Year all and stay fine in 2K9!