Someone I know once said that you should never say that you’re having the best time of your life, because to do that is to condemn your future to be miserable—it's all downhill from the peak. What you need to do is feel everything that's happening to you: pausing to acknowledge what's there, stripping your experience from any judgment, and letting the feelings come to you like a tide, ebbing and flowing.
2021 has been mostly a blur. It felt like a film and a jump cut skipped out all the important parts. I remember the first half when I was stuck in a quarantine hotel in Pampanga in January, and then when we went to La Union to see the beach after what felt like ages, and then the year fast-forwarded to June when I had my condo renovated, which was technically also a countdown until I left Manila.
Then I left. I traveled to the Balkans—to Montenegro and Albania, two beautiful countries I’ve never considered going to, if only because the nagging thought in my head was, what was there to do in those countries? But I was surprised how charming they were: a delight that was amplified by the fact that I was with the person I love.
After that is London, where I spent a huge part of the year in, squeezing in a few trips to the British countryside. (Of course, there was the Gibraltar trip, where we got married: but that’s a story I’ll share later.)
This morning, while in bed, my husband and I were talking about things we wished for 2022. “To more trips with you,” he said. I reminded him that another countdown has started: we’re nineteen days away until the big move to France, where we’ll be for the next year (or so.)
That has always been the plan, the move I mean. London was more of a temporary stop, and Montpellier was the destination, the goal. I haven’t been to the south of France, but I’m excited about the sun and the sea. In preparation for this, I’ve been trying to improve my dismal French by getting a French tutor on Preply. It also helps that my husband is a native French speaker, apart from being multilingual.
To be honest, I can’t believe that all of these life changes happened in the midst of a pandemic. It’s grating how I keep saying that but I’m still amazed how we managed to pull it off. Some part of me feels a bit sorry that I succeeded, especially when I see how the pandemic has been a terrible time for other people.
But what is the point of this sentimentality? It’s not as if my failure will save anyone. What I’ve noticed though is that there are some people who succeed who become entirely convinced that their success is wholly because of them, rather than the confluence of circumstances.
Maybe that is the human condition: the main character syndrome. We want to believe that we are the hero, that we triumphed through adversity because we made the right choices and we possess the determination and intelligence that a lot of people just don’t have. While at some level this delusion is necessary to keep our sense of self intact (and to establish a degree of accountability), to be entirely convinced that we are the only ones responsible for our success is to deny that our continued survival is a series of happy accidents.
I don’t want to offer any lessons for 2022. I think I’ve matured enough beyond providing sweeping life advice. Instead, I’ll just share a line from a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, which I’m keeping to heart for this new year:
“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
xx Evan