Saying Goodbye to 2023

While I anticipate the warmer days, I am suddenly, overwhelmingly reluctant to let go of winter. Winters in Xiamen, I’ve been told, are short. From what I’ve experienced in the past few weeks, it was only so cold the two weeks before Christmas, right around the winter solstice or, 冬至 (dongzhi) in Chinese. These days nights barely drop below 10 degrees and the days are generally warm with a little chill.

Just as suddenly as it arrived, winter and the cold are slipping away, as the year slips quietly away too.

Images shot at Zhenzhu Wan Beach, Xiamen

There's a echo of anticipation.

The second half of this year was full of anticipation, the kind that borders on dread. The opening of the Chinese borders had signaled the end of a relatively quiet and undisturbed sort of existence that began and ended in July when I finally decided I was going to China. Then there was a rush of activity driving me relentlessly towards this inevitable change in my life, and try as I might, time was not slowing, it was not allowing me to come up for air.

The dread has slowly ebbed under the constant marching on of time in Xiamen.

Under the cover of meeting new people, navigating new environments, overcoming and relearning cultural nuances, battling loneliness, setting new routines, falling in and out of routines, worrying about finances, facing up to mistakes, and overcoming anxieties to have unexpected experiences, I have learned to survive.

Most importantly, I’ve learned to try and try again for new experiences, for new knowledge. To not agonize over the small things (it's a work in agonizing progress). To seek answers where I find roadblocks. To be open to people.

I spent New Year's Eve on the beach building a friendship with a friend, where I would have normally made up an excuse to avoid the sensory overload of socializing. It was a wonderful thing.

The most wonderful things have happened in the in-between, the unexpected pauses in time when I’ve let myself become the learner, the explorer, the discoverer.

Surprises were just around the corner - a turn onto an alleyway, losing faith in my phone’s navigation, a conversation just before a shy smile at a stranger, even as my heart raced expecting hostility. The world is often not this kind.

I find that the person I am, writing this on 1st January 2024, is the sum of many unexpected, delayed moments of learning, discovering, and traveling.

I'm bad at resolutions, even worse at keeping them. The uncertainty of the future, as it promises warmth, demands that I cast off expectations in exchange for the now, surviving. For unexpected moments of having hope in the between.

Happy New Year!