Peace and good-will: the end and the beginning of a new year is always an invitation to continue moving forward.
The time, the calendar, like the Camino de Santiago, delineates and supposes a series of stages that must be completed … Always looking ahead, but with our feet on the ground; always bathed in the realism of the moment, but also embraced by the idealism that moves hearts towards heroic goals.
To look back is to recognize the path already travelled … to look forward is like looking up and contemplating the horizon towards which we are going.
But the important and decisive thing is that we are “on the way”, it is the hour of the concrete step, the humble step that always supposes an advance, although it hurts.
The Camino de Santiago is a succession of stages that, like life itself, always offer the opportunity to continue moving forward, even with suffering and in the midst of difficulties, which, in the end, strengthen the feet and spirit of the person who walks .
A new year in principle is a projection into the future that does not yet really exist (when it arrives it is today, now), a numerical game fruit of mathematics that helps us understand part of the universe, but not the heart, the being, the human soul.
That is why a new year can be understood as a new opportunity, a new stage, a move forward without fear, with hope, and always with the energy that love gives and its daughter, kindness.
Let us continue walking in this new year to build, with the footsteps of love and solidarity, a new world.
Happy New Year.
Ultreia et suseia (“courage, forward, always beyond and towards the sky”).
Paco Castro. Franciscan monk and pilgrim.
