My Wish For the New Year

I have a wish for the New Year that some way, somehow things will get better in this world. I am not very optimistic that it will, but still I hope.

Peace and hope seem to be ephemeral for so many. People look to groups and government to bring them peace, when so many fail to recognize that if each individual could seriously and without fear look at their own failures and remedy them, it would be a start towards a better existence. Each and every individual that is old enough to know the difference between right and wrong really need everyday to look at the man or woman in the mirror and ask what he or she can do to make this world a better place?

Making the world a better place is not about running away from challenges, being cowardly, being constantly critical and seeing everyone else's fault, not facing up to reality, or isolating. Some of the world's ills are the result of too few of us examing our hearts and finding out what is wrong there. This year what many of us need to do is make resolutions we can keep. This year the first place where every person can begin is to forgive all hurts and to ask for forgiveness. Just thinking I'm going to move on is not the way to go. The baggage from failed relationships and friends just accumulates and carries over to other relationships to only destroy them too in the long run.

Over the years my best friendships have been very fine in quality indeed because they all involved transparency, honesty, respect, and similar high principles. I only offer advise to my friends when they ask for it and vice versa.

It all begins with the individual. Start asking yourself each day, "How can I make someone else's day?" Not always, "How can someone make MY day?" Just a kind or delightful word, gesture, and look can go a long way in helping people. Listening helps too. No one cares much for a person who turns a conversation into a one dimensional exercise. Just listen sometimes. Tonight I just sat and listened at work to an woman who told me how she had to move to Georgia because she and husband lost their business and their home in Michigan. She is having to start over at 57. I hope my listening to her helped. I think it did. I was very happy to oblige by hearing her tale.

Last night I chatted with my best friend in Turkey just before New Year's here. We share each other's secrets and dreams, and I think it helps my friend just to have someone to listen who does not judge her. She thinks my off again on again Turkish boyfriend who lives in Turkey is being ridiculous in some of his overly emotional and Romantic comments he makes in e-mails to me, but she is like a sister to me and is free to say what she wants. I even joked with her that she can have him, even though I do care for him and is concerned about what might happen to him and his country. I have begged him to stop smoking, but he says he can't.

I do make the time to think about myself. I know when I need attention, and I know when it is time to focus on others. It is never fully about me. I hope it never becomes that way.

I had never met any Iraqis until last winter when I was Istanbul when I met a young woman name Waa'fa. Waa'fa and her family were the children of an Iraqi father and a Turkish mother. She was born in Baghdad. Before I meet her and her two brothers I had still felt very troubled about the plight of the people of Iraq. You don't have to physically meet a people to care about what happens to them. For the four years that the war in Iraq has raged, not a day has passed when my heart did not ache for that country. Some American citizens have long seemed to be only concerned about our troops, but the Iraqis are people too with hopes, dreams, and aspirations. I did not believe the surge would be big enough to help, but it seems now that perhaps it is working. I feel some happiness and hope for Iraq, a thing a year ago this time, I most certainly did not feel.

So I will end this rambling piece before midnight strikes and it is January 2nd with a very nice video of pre-war Iraq. Some of the refugees have started coming back. The walls between Sunni and Shiite communities which were erected by American forces are being brought down it is said. An Iraqi Romeo and Juliet who are "living happily ever after" now can be seen here.

Here too is my favorite video of Baghdad as it once was. The beautiful song in the video is sung by Hussein al Jasmi as in my previous post.



I wish all humankind a peaceful and a USEFUL 2008, and especially so for the people of Iraq.