Everyone was fairly tired from last night but none of us were hung over. No hangover — a good sign. Yasss, 2020. The night before, on December 31, 2019, all the Wiryadinata kids, mom, and our families and friends, celebrated New Year’s Eve together for the first time in over 10 years. The complete Wiryadinata set. My sister Veronica and her family received their Canadian citizenship and passports. We had been planning for this reunion the moment they became Canadian citizens. The American embassy kept turning down their visitor visa applications when they were still using their Indonesian and Mexican passports.
On new year’s eve, we had an Indonesian feast. Indra made his grilled chicken and oxtails. Mom made coconut rice and lalapan (Indonesian dish of fresh vegetables and shrimp paste sambal). Our friends brought different beautiful Japanese fish cakes and Swedish saffron pastries eaten during each culture’s new year’s eve. We had confetti, champagne, and sparklers to ring in the new year. We played Nitendo and danced to close the night.
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Lately, I have been going back to the memory I had of my first moment of 2020. So much good will and excitement. I had so many plans, dreams, and hopes… and I was not the only one. Everyone else seemed to have the same enthusiasm and the myriad of plans for the year. Unbeknownst to us, coronavirus had been insidiously creeping from one part of the world to another until it finally took over the world — turning many lives upside down, and putting everything to almost a grinding halt. As a result, for the past few weeks, we feel listless, yet restless. Has our unbridled and unsubstantiated enthusiasm for 2020 made these times especially difficult?
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To quiet the chatters in my brain, I listen to podcasts so that I can sleep. The habit had started even before most of the world had an inkling a pandemic was imminent. It’s not always a surefire methodology if the desired outcome is sleeping. Some episodes would keep me awake and compel me to send text messages to myself at 2 A.M. on all the thoughts, ideas, projects, or lists of people to google the next day.
One such episode was the first episode of Cheryl Strayed’s Sugar Calling. In the episode, Cheryl called her mentor from graduate school, the author George Saunders, and conversed about the uncertainties of our current time. George read the letter he wrote to his students at the start of the lockdown. A paragraph in his letter struck a chord.
“… this is when the world needs our eyes and ears and minds. This has never happened before here (at least not since 1918). We are (and especially you are) the generation that is going to have to help us make sense of this and recover afterward.”
“Are you keeping records of the emails and texts you’re getting, the thoughts you’re having, the way your hearts and minds are reacting to this strange new way of living?”George Saunders’ A Letter to My Students as We Face the Pandemic
Well, this is the start of my attempt to keep records of mine and our collective thoughts — the different ways we are, adjusting and readjusting to the new world, the memes and jokes that make us laugh, the recipes we exchange, and the pictures we capture — as we cope with the uncertainties of 2020. Having this thought has made it easier for me to train my brain to see our current situation with a different perspective — a less apocalyptic, more positive outlook of the future — and still hold on those hopes and dreams.