Via Basel: 2014 An Eventful Year
Personally I prefer a quiet and solitary New Year’s Eve. Last year however I attended the wedding of the son of a dear friend and thought of it as an aberration. I was therefore quite surprised when I recently got invited to another New Year’s Eve wedding, of a very good friend’s daughter. However, as I reflected, it turned out to be fitting end to a year full of weddings of family and friends (8 to be exact).
My highlight of course was my daughter Mandy’s wedding in May to Thomas, a grand and joyful event shared with all in EIL. Chris’s friend John’s union to Helen, an unabashedly green wedding, was featured in EIL as well. There were others too numerous to mention.
It was also a year of abundance of babies born or about to be in the large Al-Aswad clan of family and friends. My best friend Emil had his first grandchild, and I was thrilled for him, and my sister is about to welcome her first grandchild, too.
A year of losses it was as well. I miss my cousin and soul mate Samie who passed away only a few hours after asking me about Mandy’s wedding two days after the occasion. At my hospital where I have been for 38 years we lost three nuns, two in a tragic car accident.
But then, isn’t all that a microcosm of what life is all about, a cycle of birth, marriage (union producing offspring), and finally death, repeated time and time again, with a lot of stuff in between.
As for 2015, I would like to start it with this mantra borrowed from a recent interview with author Sonia Choquette in Spirituality & Health: “My heart is open and I receive and give love fearlessly.”
May all have peace, health, and serenity in 2015.
Basel Al-Aswad, father of EIL founder Chris Al-Aswad, is a yogi trapped in an Orthopedic Surgeon’s body. His loves in life include reading, hiking, enjoying nature, meditation, and spending time with his large Iraqi family.
It is the stuff in between that gets us going and makes us keep on trying.