OP-ED: New Year

Jan 01, 2023 Features / Columnists, News, The GHK Lall Column

By GHK Lall

Kaieteur News – My God!  It is a new day.  The full circle of a new day, a new week, a new month, and all in a brand-new year.  Hello 2023!  Wishes for a Happy, Healthy, and a Hearty New Year to all.  No exceptions.  A New Year does that to us; well, at least it does so to me, and then some more.

I made one resolution.  It is more of a plan and a programme: I am not going to do anything different this year, as God wills it.  Perhaps, I shall go a little gentler into the day.  I think it is powerfully possible that the times call for a greater deal of maturity of the spirit.  Once the spirit is at that elevation, the mental faculties will creep up to assure not just full bodily compliance, but to will the physical into the oneness that can be a trial, on occasion.

What to do with what we have, that is the question.  It is maybe healthier to think of this in a better manner through this little morsel of commonsense: what is the best approach to get the maximum in the plenty that rests below our feet, outside of our range of vision.  Among the first things that we must endeavour to effect is to ease up on the mistakes at every level.  I assert that we had them in 2022, long before, and we grapple with this tendency, this modus vivendi, that twists us into knots, and leave us prostrate, and vulnerable to the cleverness of others.  Also, the quarreling that is so chronic that it has become inseparable from our true natures has to go.

GHK LALL

A fell swoop isn’t going to happen, or through a flick of the fingers.  This is another area that requires long hard devoted energies, lots of authenticity, and any amount of reciprocal goodwill that we can drum up.  My word! Have we got our work cut out for us in 2023, if we want to make a go at it, with the ultimate objective being a better Guyana.  One I would be proud to call mine and invite my folks from a previous life to come visit.  Now there’s a thought.  It is one that I have harboured for a long time.

We have all these assets, all these strangers in our midst nowadays.  Thus, I say why not…  This 2023 can transform into that kind of year, if we want it that much.  I do.  I would love to observe my fellow Guyanese, peers from the past, and younger, less known ones, being able to manage; wear a wide smile across their faces, and take their passports and push it into some far, forgotten corner.  I am not hallucinating because there is the belief that there can be this kind of Guyana, and it doesn’t have to be a dozen or a score of years from now.  Why not right now? What else do we need when we already have so much?

If only we could learn to live better, teach ourselves the wisdom that each has something of substance to offer.  What could be more of commonsense than that deepness within to be discovered.  There is confidence that it is there in each one of us.  I already spoke of a resolution, so now I am due a wish since I have made none.  The wish is that we at least talk to one another.  Respectfully.  Patiently.  I will now turn up the temperature: even appreciatively.  I place this wish-part hope, a word of prayer, a little challenge, and all invitation-before us.  It is a bit of a dare too.  Reach for the citizen who is not a friend.  If I can do it, so can anyone, everyone.  I reach for the President.  I extend a hand to the Vice President.  And I hope to touch and stir the Opposition Leader.  No! I didn’t forget, for there is the Speaker, no less a cherished brother.

Just in case anyone gets the rough idea that I am lecturing or preaching, all I am doing is a treasured civic duty.  Sure, it has considerable strains of the spiritual.  But, then again, what is really real that doesn’t?  There comes a time that we have stop talking, and start acting.  Not playacting, but pulling our weight and producing works that stand tall and bow before no man, or no moment, and for one reason only.  They are clean, correct, and conscientious.  They are of citizenship of a kind that we have never had.  I say we must now, right now in this new, sparking, waiting 2023.

May it be a new year like we have never had.  I think it can be.  A wonderful New Year to everyone, friend, foe, favourite.  May God bless Guyana!  That means all Guyanese also.