Well-Wishing
What I usually tell others on such well-wishing occasions as New Year’s might be taken as a rather harsh thing to say if you don’t think about it for a moment (or if you value life itself more than it’s quality, or if you’re a selfish ass), plus that I actually came up with it in Romanian and when it’s translated it makes less sense because the traditional wishes differ. That can create some rather interesting moments, especially since I only tell these things to a few people, you won’t catch me sending off greetings to a whole list… It’s a bit strange to wish someone well and then have to explain that you actually wished them well…
You see, the regular thing to say over here is “la multi ani”, which means something along the lines of “many years to come”, so simply wishing for a long life. But I changed that into something that seems to make far more sense to me, and been trying out several translations for a while now. The last one I came up with is: “Wish you’ll live just as long as you can be happy and fulfilled, without your happiness requiring the suffering of another who doesn’t deserve such pain.”
It’s quite simple, wish you’ll either be happy and fulfilled, without hurting anybody who doesn’t deserve it in the process, or die. It would mean that if you’ll still be alive you will be happy and fulfilled without earning bad karma, and if you’ll die it’d be because you couldn’t be happy and fulfilled without destroying others’ lives in the process. Sounds good and fair to me, but it did piss off a few people in these years since I’ve been using it…
Then again, I could always use my grandpa’s regular saying for such occasions: “May what you wish for me happen to you and what I wish for you happen to me.” He’d say that, usually when more people are gathered around, and look at faces to see if anybody got upset, to know how things stand. I think it’s really well said, at least when you’re among people you consider to be friends… Besides, it would include my wish without actually saying it. It would mean that it applies to myself instead of them, but that’d be great too… But I’ll rather stick to mine, be more specific.
Either way, still interesting to see how many people are bothered by it…
