We shall meet again in the space between Winter and Spring
10:46 pm. Sunday night. I lost my wallet a few hours ago when I was out playing soccer and that got me really upset. When I got home I scoured every nuke and cranny of my house in the vain hope that just maybe I hadn’t gone out with it. But it was nowhere to be found. So I concluded it was gone.
Then I fell into bed and just lay there doing nothing in particular for about half an hour. And then something made me go to the kitchen. Then I saw coffee and those S-shaped biscuits I bought from Dollarama on my way back from church. Now I’m sitting at my table, past my bedtime, with the S-shaped biscuits and a cup of coffee to keep me warm as I write.
The biscuits taste like the color pink and the coffee is much too hot for me. I like it better hot though, because it means I will have to take less frequent sips of it, which gives me more time to concentrate on writing.
Don’t ask me what a color is supposed to taste like because I honestly cannot explain. It just felt natural to say that, and that is what I usually do when I write this sort of article.
Everything before this paragraph was written four weeks ago. I have since recovered my lost wallet, celebrated my birthday, and watched the Winter give way to Spring.
Let me unpack these three highlights one after the other.
First, the wallet. It turns out I had dropped it at a bus stop and a kind stranger picked it up, saw my ID in the wallet, looked me up on social media, and sent me a message asking me to come collect my wallet. I collected it a day after I got the message, for which I am immensely grateful!
I’ll talk about my first Winter experience next.
Nothing terrified me more about moving to Canada than the thought of the Winter cold. I am a very lazy human being in cold weather; I just want to curl up under my blanket and only get out of bed when I can no longer bear the hunger. So I feared not only the cold but also the possibility that it might negatively affect my performance at work.
But it turns out that while my fears were totally warranted, there is always something that can be done about the cold. And since I didn’t have to go out very frequently, I was well-positioned to combat this cold effectively. So I kept the heater running every hour of every day that I was in the house.
On the few occasions when I had to go out, I made sure I tucked myself into layers upon layers of clothing; and at times even that was not enough. One time in December, I went to an ice skating rink and got so stricken by the cold that I thought I might fall to the ground and freeze into a block of ice.
On some days, when the swirling ice winds raged and raged, leaving deep piles of snow everywhere, it felt as though I was witnessing the early stages of an apocalypse. It was always difficult to imagine that, at those times, in some corner of the world, there would be perfect sunshine.
But Winter is gone now and I am much relieved thereby. I won’t miss it much, except for the fact that I will no longer go ice skating every Friday after work as I used — it was one of the few joys of the winter and perhaps the only thing I will be looking forward to in the next Winter.
Lastly, my birthday.
I was born on April 11 but around that period this year, I was so busy at work that I decided I wasn’t going to do anything to celebrate my birthday — I didn’t even consider taking that day off and simply resting.
“I don’t really care about these things anyway, it’s just another day,” I told myself. ‘Or do I?’ came the afterthought, silent but firm.
I reflected back to the last time I actually did something tangible for my birthday and it was so far back it made me shudder to think of it. It was an actual birthday party, and it was beautiful. I can say with the wisdom of hindsight that it was only beautiful because it was a shared experience.
Every other birthday celebration between then and now is all but forgotten, and that is largely because for those particular birthdays, I probably just did something nice for myself rather than throw a party or some such shared experience.
Most guys I know — myself included — sneer at birthday celebrations of any kind, even weddings. They get way too practical and call it “just another day” and feel themselves above such trifles.
Maybe they are right. Or maybe they’re just being shallow. Most likely, it’s the latter because as someone who used to belong to that camp, when I look back at some of the most fun-filled and memorable moments in my life, almost all — if not all — of them involved some degree of a shared social experience — and this is coming from an introvert.
If you go back to our very cradle you will find this to be true: newborn babies can die simply from the lack of a compassionate touch. It is an innate need in all of us. So even when we think we don’t need it, we probably do. This got me thinking about what other things I probably need but won’t admit it to myself. I think there are tons of them but for that period I decided I would start with actually celebrating my birthday in the most conventional way.
So I decided to throw a mini-party which turned out to be way more fun than I had anticipated — that is how these things often turn out to be. So not only was it a good birthday party, there was a great life lesson in it: I was debunking old knowledge that was clearly never helpful to begin with and taking on a new perspective. Winter gave way to Spring, and in between that was my birthday.
Cheers!