Pushing through
Re: "A year of shocks, but Thailand endures", (Opinion, Dec 30).
As 2025 makes an exit, a familiar ritual of optimism falls upon heavy shoulders.
For many, this is not the season of renewal but one of exhaustion and exasperation: a sense that we have arrived at an ending without relief or resolution.
WB Yeats' "things fall apart; the centre cannot hold" resonates loudly, with institutions feeling brittle and communal trust fraying.
Antonio Gramsci described such moments with bleak precision: "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born."
The resurgence of rightist forces (Pauline Hansen and Barnaby Joyce in Australia, for instance), the Muslim community experiencing backlash after the Bondi shootings, Mr Trump's tirades and the tsunami of climate catastrophes announce barren hope and are a harbinger of worse to come.
This precarity signals uncertainty and desperation in the year left behind.
The problem with year-end reflection is that it demands optimism where scarce such is warranted.
Samuel Beckett captured this tension perfectly: "I can't go on. I'll go on." It is not triumph that sustains people now, but endurance. Survival has to become its own (and sometimes only) quiet achievement, alas.
TS Eliot observed that endings do not always arrive with drama, but "not with a bang but a whimper". That sense of anticlimax -- of effort expended without reward -- weighs heavily as we look toward a 2026 whose prospects appear, at best, uncertain.
Perhaps the task at each year's end is not to summon false cheer, but to acknowledge the weariness, adopt the uncertainty, and persist as best as one can anyway. We can only hope that 2026's birth improves upon the expiry of a horribly spent 2025.
Joseph Ting
