On the Privilege of Change
When I was young, I was always the new kid. From Grade 1 up to Grade 5, I had managed to go to five different schools, moving across cities, provinces and even countries. As an introvert, I hated being the new student. It meant saying goodbye to my old friends and learning to adapt to new teachers, new rules and new friends, time and time again. I became an expert at pretending to sing “Oh Canada” when I still did not have the lyrics figured out, learning how to write essays in Chinese in a classroom where I was considered a “foreigner”. Through all of this, I never became a fan of change, but slowly, I learned how to manoeuvre it, as tactfully as an 8 year old could.
The 28 year old me of today could learn a lot from 8 year old me. I am currently trying to deal with change as gracefully as I can, but I don’t know if I am succeeding. There are good days and bad days. There are days when change is exciting and liberating, and there are days when you wish you could turn back time and live in the safety of the past. I have now become well acquainted with nostalgia, and how dangerous it can be. It feeds off of our need for comfort and certainty, and it replays for us only the good that has come and gone while fuelling our fear for the unpredictable future.
Left with no alternative, I have been trying to live in the present. The good thing about Toronto is that there no shortage of things to do, places to see, people to meet. Just walking down the street last week, I ran into an old friend from undergrad I hadn’t seen in years. Last night, I had dinner with a new colleague. We had such a good time, that at the end she told me that she had an extra room and was looking for a roommate until the summer, in case I wanted to stay in Toronto a little longer.
I really am enjoying my time in Toronto. Despite the size of the city, I feel welcomed by it. There is sense of ease that surrounds my interactions with this city — it does not feel like I am going against the current by being here. I am having lovely interactions with passing strangers. Today, our streetcar had to slowly skim past a car parked too close to the road. When it succeeded, the whole streetcar burst into applause. I laughed and clapped along, feeling like I was part of something that no one outside of the train would understand. Small moments like these feel serendipitous to me. I am a big believer in serendipity, of tiny beautiful unexpected moments. It feels like a small reward from the universe, a little wink, to let you know that you are on the right track after all.
I want to take a short pause from Toronto for now, so that we can take small trip to the other side of the world, to North-Eastern China where my cousin lives. I want to you tell about her story, because it sets a precedent for what I want to explain later on.
My cousin was born 2 days before me. She is a twin, with an older identical twin brother. She is my second cousin, meaning that her grandfather and my grandfather are brothers. My grandfather’s family grew up very poor in the countryside; his father, his grandfather, and his great grandfather had all been farmers. My great-grandfather died when my grandfather was 14; my cousin’s grandfather was only 3 at that time. Perhaps it was because of this, or because of other unknown variables, that their lives played out through very different trajectories. My grandfather passed the university entrance exam, received his degree and moved to the city where he later met my grandmother, a teacher. They had my dad, who went to university, and he later met my mom, another university graduate. They later had me, and together we moved to Canada, where I went to university. I don’t mean to harp on the university point, as I think there are many ways to become educated, but I emphasize it in this story because I feel like it was a deciding factor in how our lives unfolded. There is a reason why education is called the great equalizer, because it allows you to climb beyond the social rung that you were born into. My grandfather’s brother never went to university, neither did his son, nor his children. To this day, they continue to live on the farm that my grandfather grew up in. They are good, honest, hardworking people, and they are my family. But sometimes, I think about my cousin, born only 2 days before me, and I think about what our lives would be like if we had swapped grandfathers, if it was her grandfather who went to university and not mine. It really was a decision that impacted the fate of generations.
I love my cousin. She is bright and kind and generous, the type of person that is hard not to love. This time when I went back to China, we spent a lot of time together, staying up and talking all night. Despite our differences, we were quite similar in the way we viewed the dynamics of life and relationships. I found her to be more mature than I was, with a better understanding of life’s complexities, along with the many hard decisions and sacrifices that came with it. During one of our conversations, I asked her whether she was looking forward to anything in her future. She told me, not really. I kept going, and tried to help her brainstorm ideas, like “what if you moved to the city?” or “what if you started your own business?”. She seemed distant when she finally responded that her family probably wouldn’t allow it. I didn’t push the topic further after that.
I think about her a lot, even now that I am back in Canada. I think about the problems on her plate, which seem a lot more “real” than mine. I think about her future, which seems a lot more set in stone, with very little potential for the unexpected. And finally, I think about how it could have just as easily been me in her shoes, had I been born two days earlier, with a different grandfather.
It is sobering, really, to think about these things. For a moment, it felt silly to be sad about the things I was sad about. I realized what it a privilege it was to experience change, because it meant your life had no fixed path, and that your future was still open to the potential of infinite possibilities. And although uncertainty is scary, isn’t it also such a wonderful thing? To not know what the future holds, thus allowing us take ownership of it, and steer it in a direction of our choosing. Uncertainty is what hopes and dreams are made of.
A few nights ago in Toronto, I went to a language exchange event at a pub. I met some great people, but I really got along with two in particular. One was a recent immigrant from Algeria who was in between jobs, while trying to look for his dream job in his field of expertise. The other, was a PhD in mathematics, who was also trying to find a suitable career after recently graduating. We were not so dissimilar in our stages of life, and perhaps for this reason we got along quite well. We spoke a mixture of English and French throughout the night, and after we were tired of conversation, we decided to go downstairs to check out the “piano man” who plays every night at 10:30. My two friends had seen him before, and told me he was quite excellent. I was picturing something quite classy: a grand piano, some smooth jazz perhaps. What I was not expecting, was a guy straight out of a Billy Joel song — a half-bald, beer-drinking, song-belting piano man. He was surrounded by a bar, with men sat around him in a semi-circle banging their hands on the counter to the beat. One of them later gave me to the seat next to him, and I joined in on the banging and the belting. Needless to say, I had a hell of a time.
Amidst the singing, I thought about my cousin, and wished she was here to experience this chaos. I think it would blow her mind.
All this to say, I think that once in a while, we need an element of surprise and chaos in our lives. Sometimes, it is a happy unexpected thing, like a serendipitous encounter, or a crazy piano man at a bar. Sometimes, it is something you are not ready for, like a heartbreak or the loss of a job, and it is like a cold water plunge that shakes you awake. It is difficult to go through, and to fully feel and process, but in the end, the discomfort is a reminder that we are not on some predestined path, and that there so much room for uncertainty and possibility and choice — and ultimately happiness, in our lives.
This a privilege that not everyone possesses, and I’ve become more and more aware of this now. I am very lucky to be where I am. I am lucky to have gone through all the change that I have up to now, and to come out of it thriving. Whether it is God, or the universe, or something more or something less, I always had faith that things end up working out in the end. This thought brings me a lot of comfort on this Sunday night, during a season of my life that is filled with change.
Everything will be alright.
Goodnight,
Cindy
The piano man agrees: everything, everything will be alright