8 MARCH 2028

When I was an eleven-year-old student, our teacher made us write an essay with this title to stimulate our imagination: “8 March 2028 – describe yourself and the world around you on that date.”

In my essay I made a lot of predictions about my future life, but as far as I can remember, none of them turned out to be real.

I didn’t predict that I would become an author and a traveler.

We can program our life, but very often it goes its way regardless of our plans. Casual happenings drag us here and there beyond our control.

Now I am at Arambol Beach in Goa (India) for my winter holidays.

How did I spend the last day of the year? At dawn I went jogging on the beach, saluted the rising sun, and helped some fishermen that asked me to give them a hand to beach their heavy boat.

At night, I walked along the seaside where thousands of people were waiting for the stroke of midnight.

On the first day of the new year, I went to the beach at daybreak again. There were a few cleaners that were collecting the garbage littered by those who had celebrated Happy New Year all night.

I jogged and then saluted the rising sun as usual. It was the same sun as yesterday. Seeing me, the fishermen waved their hands from a distance. Nothing had changed! We humans divide time into days, months and years, and make wishes whenever a new year comes, but in nature there is only an uninterrupted flow of happenings without beginning or end.

Ettore Grillo author of these books:
– A Hidden Sicilian History
– The Vibrations of Words
-Travels of the Mind
http://www.amazon.com/author/ettoregrillo