What does the new year promise me?

It is pretty late to post a new year post, but.. meh..

I made tons of resolutions last year. Of course, I didn't follow up with all of them, but some of them did stick. Notably I read 4.5 books, made $3K in the stock market, started cooking regularly, hiked regularly and backpacked across Europe. And few of them I failed miserably to keep up (got two speeding tickets :P). So all in all, 2009 was a good year for me.

I have been blogging alot less lately, mainly because I'm tweeting more and because I have to censor some contents (politics, culture, religion etc). To vent it out, I've been maintaining an anonymous blog where I can bitch and moan about all the issues I want.

This year I just have one resolution: to make 2010 more dynamic that 2009, to grow more, to do more, and to be more. Growing up is a strange process; people tend to develop tunneled vision (they see what they want to see and shut everything else out), become more cynical, throw their ideals for something more practical and short term.. needless to say, I hate growing up. In 2010, I promise myself to keep open to ideas, stay optimistic about the future and never ever compromise on my ideals for any sort of instant gratification.

Does that mean I'm not putting anything concrete on paper for 2010?.. Absolutely not. It means that my 2010 resolutions are the same as my 2009 resolutions. I'll just learn from the mistakes I made in 2009 and attack the list with new found experience.

2009 was also a year of profound realizations. Over the years I've gradually been turning into an atheist/agnostic. My belief system is somewhat closer to what Deepak Chopra preaches, which simply put, says that if God is divine, humans can't imagine what God would look like or even want, so there's no such thing as "acting on his behalf". Since religion is so closely tied with "culture", I had dismissed it as another construct used to divide human society... I was mistaken. Culture is snapshot of the society; loosely put, it is just an average of the phenotypes. If you think of cultures as states in a state machine (human evolution), you can almost plot the evolution of the human society. There are hundreds of cultures on this planets, which are constantly evolving, effecting each other and in contention with each other. This will always be the case and is some what necessary for cultural evolution, but at the very grass root level, all humans are the same; they hate change, want to be loved, and want to be happy. As long as we accept these facts and not care too much about where the culture is heading or how "cultured" we are (which seems more like the std deviation now :P ), we'll be fine as a human race. If you don't agree with me, I'd suggest that you travel more :).. Once you break your cultural boundaries, it is easy to see that everyone is the same. I've been really lucky to have experienced it first hand..

So 2010, here I am with an open mind, free of prejudice, knapsack full of dreams and a list of what needs to be done this year :).. help me become a better, more accomplished man.