I remember my childhood names for Adey Abeba that blooms in September. I remember the feeling of new year’s eve and how I spent my time walking up to these yellow garden which felt like a mixture of heaven — The memories of odor and the beauty of flowers that bloom in adversity is the most rare and beautiful of all.
Every new month brings with it a sense of regeneration, but September is different. In color psychology, the color yellow is associated with hope, sunshine, and positivity. I think that is why people get excited about the new year. Sometimes a new month or new year doesn’t necessarily mean a new start. I believe that we can still carry our unfinished goals from a month to the other or a year to another without losing enthusiasm. But, there’s still something beautiful about the new year, about that moment of twilight when the last day of the year is fading but tomorrow still waits.
These days, it seems like people are losing hope and compassion for others. The amount of lies and fake news we see on the internet is disheartening. Unfortunately, we abandoned our past in hope that we can be better in the future. Not knowing that every great nations in the world are built upon their past values and culture. It’s important to pay attention to the kind of basic human values that have been cultivated in Ethiopia for thousands of years. There is something beautiful about the community that respects social values and norms — at one point or another, growing up in a village where everyone helped each other made it easy to accept that you don’t need much in life to be happy and hopeful.
We are heading to the new year. We finish the year as we lived most of it — in a state of a global pandemic and a war in some part of the country. Even at this time of stress, beauty and hope still exist in the world around you. Amid the gloom though, as long as there is still a tomorrow — there’s still hope, there is a change and there’s redemption.
…Happy Ethiopian New Year 2018!
