Anything can happen

 January 4, 2021

 

It’s the first working day of the year. Besides karate on Sunday, it’s been a loungey few days. The picnic our dojo had planned on New Year’s Day rained out. I was bummed but the lazy me was glad to stay on our new sofa, a day bed really, and read. 

 

I started the new year with 'A Burning' and 'The Vanishing Half'. Two very differently paced books. When the quick short chapters of Majumdar get to me I sink into Vanishing Half. And when my mind needs time to process the rolling circular forward motion of Vanishing Half, I run along quickly with A Burning while allowing that to happen in the background. The mix feels good.

 

In the first week of December, I impulsively ordered a new sofa. We had been thinking about it for a while as the old one was tired and torn - can blame the fur babes for the latter. We knew what we wanted next, but I feared that getting a new sofa would necessitate further furniture changes, as the new light and sleek design would look ‘random’ in the mish mash of oddments from Ikea that we have acquired in the living space over the years. The change felt too huge and unsettling to make and I kept putting it off. 

 

But on that day in early December, as I was waiting to see the doctor at Suntec, I went recklessly into Scanteak and ordered the new one. Then panicked later that evening.

 

The sofa was delivered on December 29^th and as it turned out the change to this new something, much more suitable than the old, wasn’t so hard. Three pieces in the living room will have to go and two new ones bought. 

 

On New Years Eve, on the edge between 2020 and 2021, I sat cross-legged on this new sofa and stared at the night sky lit up by Singapore’s CBD. The new year felt like the depths of the sky further up, a vast and empty void. I felt trepidation and hope and expectation but complete uncertainty and not knowing. I had never thought this way about a new year before. Often, I had vague or definite plans for the year. This year there are none. Often, I had desires and resolutions, this year, besides one to cook more often, there are none. There is nothing at all in the year, but strangely it does not feel scary. 

 

And the new sofa is infinitely more comfortable than the old one. 

 

I think this sofa changing exercise has given me courage to allow change. To follow the impulses, I may have instead of planning and worrying. To simply let things be at times and shake them up at others while also letting them be. The whole previous year has been a practice of that. I may have done it badly on most days and well on a few, but it has forced me to live in the present and put aside thoughts of the vast unknowns of the future. It strengthened me even as it wore me down to my core, forcing me once again to discover true north. I don’t have words to describe this direction yet, but I feel like my bones and cells have grown a new compass. 

 

As the year ended, I had written about the shift within from heaviness to unexpected lightness. Over the weekend I felt energy, to do some of the things I had given up due to mental exhaustion last year, return. Even if I am hurtling with the rest of the world towards an unspecifiable tomorrow I feel I am doing it with renewed awareness. Anything can happen.