The new year is a time for optimism.
No matter how grief-stricken, stress-inducing or just plain exhausting the 12 preceding months have been, January presents the chance to start again.
Wandering around the usually quiet beachside towns where so many of us spend the fading days of the preceding year, peoples’ faces are flushed with both sunburn and opportunity. Despite inevitable family fights over the rules of Pictionary or the ideal thickness when slicing a Christmas ham, the mood for most of us is positive.
There’s something awfully special about those lazy few days between the 25th of December and the 1st of January. Wasting away hours on an impossible 5000 piece puzzle, playing backyard cricket until it’s too dark to see the ball any longer, filling every square centimetre of stomach space and somehow still having room for one more slice of pavlova.
You get to block out the horrors of the world for a little while and relinquish the responsibilities of being an adult.
There is a renewed sense of the possible. And the possible, is good.
Top Comments
I've been so disappointed by the media coverage of the Little boys' murder (not including this article). Their dad is being talked about as a top bloke, great dad, and his struggle with depression is being blamed for what he did. I sympathise with whatever he was going through in terms of mental illness, it must have been a heavy cross to bear. But murdering your kids is not a logical and understandable characteristic of depression!!! It's a crime. It's based on a belief that children are commodities that belong to a man and he can do with them whatever he wishes. A motive has yet to be established in this case, but an all-too-common theme of revenge murder of children to 'get back at' the mother is part of the domestic violence epidemic we need to fight in this country. Whatever the motive, this man is a murderer and took advantage of the innate trust of his vulnerable children to extinguish their lives in a brutal, heartless way. He deserves condemnation, not praise. He is no "top bloke".
It's generally based on the absolute knowledge that the world is such a heinous place and living is so pointless with despair that you are 'delivering' your children from the bleakest kind of existence, not murdering them. There's nothing logical anout people's response to depression. The 'all-too-common theme' is the one most beloved of the media. They never follow up and tell you about the cases that weren't revenge. I thought that we all had to have endless tolerance and understanding of mental illness in this modern world apparently not when it effects 'little kiddies'.