Happy New Year (….. & Happy 1st Blogiversary to me!)

Happy New Year, everyone! I know this is a bit late for a new year greeting, but better late than never, right? I had intended to put up a New Year post in conjunction with the one year blogiversary for A Reader’s Footprints a week earlier, but was unfortunately knocked out by a bad bout of flu. Been struggling to regain my lost voice, while battling a nasty cough and a persistent fever at the same time. It’s only now that I am feeling much better, and finally able to put this post up.

So, here we are. A whole new year, full of possibilities and fresh promises lying all stretched out ahead. It’s been a year and a bit now, since I started this blog. It has been a good journey for me and I have enjoyed the experience as well as all the interaction carried out with every single one of you who has been kind enough to have dropped by for a visit in the past year. Thank you all, for having added in some way or other, to the pleasure and comfort that I find in keeping up this little blog here.

It is interesting to note that I had started the previous year with Something Fresh by P.G Wodehouse, and had ended the year aptly with All Passion Spent by Vita Sackville-West. Both the books brought me much reading pleasure. Although I did not manage to read (or rather, finish reading) many books in the past year, but what I did read, I had mostly liked. A few I had loved, and even fewer still, had me unimpressed. All in all, I would say it was a good reading year for me, just not in terms of quantity I guess.

I have enjoyed reading about all the reading plans and resolutions that many of you have made across the blogosphere, and though I have not come up with any lists or plans of my own this year, it is still exciting to think of all the possibilities that are waiting to be had.  I can only say that I will put in some serious effort in making a bigger dent in the stacks of TBR this year. My reading choices will be mainly based on whim but I might try to join in for a couple of reading events here and there, as the year trundles along.

Remember the ‘sea lion who lost the sea‘ story I posted in my very first post here, a year ago? Well, here’s what became of the sea lion a year later.

When the wind had ceased to blow, the sea lion had a dream. Now, as I told you before, there were other nights in which he had dreamed of the sea. But those were long ago and nearly forgotten. Even still, the ocean that filled his dreams this night was so beautiful and clear, so vast and deep, it was as if he were seeing it for the very first time. The sunlight glittered on its surface, and as he dived, the waters all around him shone like an emerald. If he swam quite deep, it turned to jade, cool and dark and mysterious.

But he was never frightened, not at all. For I must tell you that in all his dreams of the sea, he had never before found himself in the company of other sea lions. This night there were many round about him, diving and turning, spinning and twirling. They were playing.

Oh, how he hated to wake from that wonderful dream. The tears running down his face were the first wet thing he had felt in [a long time]. But he did not pause even to wipe them away, he did not pause in fact, for anything at all. He set his face to the east, and began to walk as best as a sea lion can.
‘Where are you going?’ asked the tortoise.
‘I am going to find the sea.’

John Eldredge, ‘Desire’

I think I have found the ‘sea’. Right here.

And all of you, my dear fellow ‘sea lions’, are what makes finding the sea such a worthwhile journey.

😉