New Beginnings

There is no doubt that 2020 was a difficult year for many. The global pandemic, the losses people suffered due to it, challenges to the very way we live our daily lives and conduct business, social distancing, wearing of facial masks, sanitizing hands … our very complacent existence was thrown into turmoil!

2020, however, was not all bad. The pandemic and the changes it brought to our lives also gave us the opportunity to prioritize and reprioritize people and things in our lives and realize what is important to us. I am certain that despite all the adjustments we’ve had to make in our lives, and the new things we’ve had to adopt, we’ve all been able to do things differently.

Being stuck at home during the lockdown, this year was for me one of many “firsts”. It was the first summer I was able to spend time with my daughter as I was not preoccupied with working through summer. It was a year of exploring many North Shore trails and hikes which I’d never done before despite having lived in the area for 10 years!  It was also the year of reconnecting with people from my past and rekindling old friendships, thus rediscovering the value of friendship along with shared memories and experiences. At the end of 2020, I realized I had many things to be grateful for, and fewer things to complain about.

Starting the new year on this positive note, I’d like to share with you a favourite poem of mine, originally written in Bengali by Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore. Published in 1910, before India’s independence, it is the 35th poem in the collection Gitanjali, and represents Tagore’s vision of a new and awakened India. This poem, or “school prayer” which I learnt as a child at elementary school, filled me with awe then, and still does now. The simplicity of the wisdom contained within it is something our world could benefit from, even today. I am sharing here Tagore’s own English translation from the 1912 English Edition of Gitanjali.

Source: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rabindranath-Tagore

GITANJALI 35 - By Rabindranath Tagore

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee
into ever-widening thought and action;
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let me awake.