I wrote a post complaining about U of T newspapers that I may get around to finishing one day. I gave up on it because I got busy going home for the weekend and because somewhere in the last three days I found something more important to say. It is about people.

In the last days of highschool I felt so much like I was moving. A feeling sort of like the one I get from driving in Mustangs; no matter where I am going, it is somewhere that really matters. I guess I kind of figured that this was the natural time for us all to become adults, suddenly we would all just know how to live.

Then the summer happened with all of its melodrama and heartbreak and I lost that feeling. I replaced with a sense of hopelessness, a sensation of stumbling in the dark and when I got tired of that, I think I just stopped moving altogether.

One way or another (I am not sure how) I managed to make it out of that summer and into University. I survived the first week and than the second and somewhere in the last couple of days I came to realize that the people around me were all in the same boat.

I watched as friends of mine moved away from home to cities they had never been to, as they struggled with illness and boredom and fear, I heard them yell and scream about so many things, friends lost hope and doubted faith, I watched as a friend feared for the lives of the people he loves and I watched his mother cry.

In all of this, somehow I don't feel lost. I don't feel like we are all fucking up, or that somehow the world is less than what it should be. In all of this I have a suprising faith that never ever left me.

To try to explain where this comes from would be impossible and a waste of perfectly good words. So I will just say a little bit about the autumn, which most of you already know is a fundamental metaphor in my life. Generally nostalgia and sadness rule the fall. Death and bad things always seem to happen when the leaves change colour. Just listen to Hawksley Workman sing Autumn's Here and you will understand.

But for some people this weekend is the new year. It feels that way to me. It feels like if I make a resolution right this minute, I may have a chance of keeping it up for the next 356 days.

A dear friend of mine turned 18 today. For her the last year has been hard. For all of us, but I know just how many fences she has had to climb, mostly on her own. In the next twenty minutes she will be 18 and one day and it will start to seem like a new year never began, but it deserves to be said that she is a better person, in my view a stronger and healthier person, than she was this time last fall and I know that she, just like all of us, will be even further along when the calendars fall on this day again.

We are doing badly. We have crappy relationships and bad marks, we don't understand everything and sometimes we lie, we make mistakes unknowingly and knowingly but as I have always said hope is just a light to show you the way, but faith is what keeps you wandering around, even in the dark.

And more important than that, in this new year (even if it isn't a new year for me), every single one of us can look around and know that we are not alone.


Sam