The best day of the year
Another year has come and gone, and 2019 was wild! Not only are we entering a new year but we are entering a new decade.
It was a topsy-turvy year and so we reached out to some of our readers and asked them what they considered was a highlight of 2019.
For Pravin Jayasundere, it was being part of the ‘The three musketeers’ production by Royal College Colombo that was staged earlier this year. “We were aiming at pulling off a two hour long production and gaining a significant profit which would be used to fund drama in school for the next two years, all within 2 1/2 months,” he tells us about his most hectic and fulfilling two months of 2019.
Having been able to successfully pull off a production, both in a theatrical and a financial aspect, in the span of two months whilst teaching drama kids the basics and the complexities of portraying a character (with the director doing 90% of the work), pulling off a crazy publicity campaign as well as fundraising was what made 2019 special for Pravin.
“It may not have been a huge goal or milestone, but I feel like a better person overall in 2019 more than I did in 2018,” says an anonymous reader on how he started to focus more on his health this year. In 2018, he used to be somewhat of a heavy smoker and it was at the end of 2018 that he realised that smoking would not be great for his future. He says he started playing basketball again, a sport that he really loved and realised that playing the sport drove away the craving for the nicotine. Although the achievement may seem small for some, it really was a momentous step for this reader.
Sandaru Illeperuma’s most significant achievement this year was taking a chance and applying for a position of research assistant for his second year of his undergraduate degree. “I had a very low probability of landing this job but somehow due to luck I got the job and will now be working part time in university,” he tells us as he is quite excited to be working in the lab dealing with programmed ribosomal frameshift mutations in the West Nile virus.
For one of our readers who also wishes to remain anonymous, it wasn’t a specific moment in 2019 that she feels was her highlight of the year but instead it was how she embraced gratitude and was rewarded for it immensely. “I realized the power of gratitude as it was put into words in the Gospel of Matthew ‘Whoever has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.’ The same was revealed in the Koran as ‘And when God proclaimed: If you are grateful I will give you more; but if you are ungrateful verily my punishment is indeed severe.’ These verses manifested in my life in 2019,” she shares with us.
She saw her prayers being accepted before her very eyes. By getting out of a toxic relationship, she was able to put more work into her studies and the efforts paid off. She got many job offers as well as met many wonderful people who became her friends, she went on a pilgrimage and the list still goes on.
“There have been lows as well but hey c’est la vie,” she tells us as she ends her wrap up for the year.