At first, December meant sleet, wool thermals, and the bitterly dry, skin-slicing winds of a Beijing winter. The loud cracks of the heater. A lone out-of-towner selling candied hawthorns on his bicycle on a grey day – the red fruits looking precarious and hazy under the shield of a weathered plastic box. Winter had arrived, and I turned another year older.
Now, turning older occurs at the height of a sun-kissed Kiwi summer. It catches me off-guard, and before I know it, the year is over and another birthday looms.
I had never been much of a planner, but for years I would spend the immediate weeks after each birthday strategising the year ahead. I fastidiously typed out future plans and ambitions in Word documents, as if that somehow made them come to life. Sometimes, the plans materialised, other times they vanished without a whiff of reality, but the bullet-pointed lists were more than anything a protection against life’s many uncertainties.
But things were changing. I entered 2016 not wanting to think.
In an email to my friend Matt, I wrote: “ I feel numb to the fact that I walked out of 2015 with a new flashy degree. Usually I would spend days reflecting on the year that passed by and planning ahead for the next, but this time I haven’t done any reflecting, nor do I feel the urge to do so. It seems like the tides of life have swept us off our feet more than our conscious choices, making resolutions and reflections more redundant?” All at once, an emerging resilience and comfort with the unknown had seeped into my being, forever altering its landscape.
By last December, all I wrote was one sentence – “I wanted to go into 2017 feeling like myself again.”
Perhaps, in a world where not knowing itself is an adventure, just being yourself is enough.
“I wish I could see into the future sometimes, just ten years later,” I whispered to a friend last night, “not to know who I’d marry or how many kids I would have, but just to know that everything would turn out ok.” My misty mind was conjuring up a house, a family, a career, but like a bad quality photo, the hazy pixels yield less and less clarity as I zoom in. The place? Unknown. The faces? Devoid of features.
Perhaps I was keeping them intentionally blank for fear of overstepping the bounds of fate. But maybe, just maybe, I had finally grown up enough to understand that the unchartered territory can live in perfect harmony with stability and joy, that an unknown future can still be a good one.
His voice, so calm in the darkness of the night, crackled on the line, a transmission of static and sincerity from 650km to the south.
“I understand, and it will be ok”.
Musings of a Leaf 