#9: On a season of amor fati
An extrapolation of a concept Nietzsche was enthusiastic about. I hope you'll read this while listening to a track by Durand Jones & the Indications.
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I know my last commentary was on the oh-so-wise tenets of my 20s so naturally, this one should be something equally, if not far more, wise in its provisions to dedicated readers like yourselves.
Alas, I am going to start this one instead with a healthy dose of self-deprecating self-reflection. I’ve realized lately that I’m a regular to the adage “life is too short”. My friends seldom call me out on it and more often than not, they agree. But I am me and it was during one of these more recent moments when I realized, true to form, that what I’m really trying to say is that life is unexpected. I’ve been digging the infinity presented by this unexpectedness. We just never know how an experience or a person can change us, but we can embrace the vast uncertainty of it.
Each day comes to us like a newly cellophaned present, a chance for an entirely fresh start.
- Philip Larkin (in a letter to his mother)
I think about this line a lot. Somehow, regenerated cellulose doesn’t quite conjure up the type of freshness I seek in my life. However, I applaud the sentiment that our past doesn’t have to influence our decision-making into the future. Since turning 30 (see my last rambling here), I’ve begun to regard my life’s events as not good or bad but instead just, well, necessary. Simply, put, the last few weeks have veritably been a season of leaping into change - a new role, a new geography, and a lot of newness in all respects. I’m here for it. Amor fati.
If I’m going to venture into a discourse on fate, I’ll unabashedly admit that I’ve watched 500 Days of Summer more times than likely anyone you know. Apart from the fact that the movie has one of the best compilations of bangers (The Smiths, Temper Trap, The Black Lips, Regina Spektor…need I say more?), it’s also the way in which it simultaneously crushes and re-affirms one’s belief in fate that has me circling back. Her manic pixie dream aesthetic aside, Summer’s matter-of-fact revelation that she met her husband while sitting in a deli reading Dorian Gray, and that it was just meant to be, is the scene that gets me every time. It is perplexing to realize that despite all of our fate hate (lol), it is difficult to otherwise explain how some things just happen. So, our only role is to just accept them.
I think I’ve always shared an affinity towards fate, likely born out of the nomadism of my life and the fact that change has always been a key constant. This year’s shifted this supposed affinity into a definite life ethos. It’s been refreshing to just acknowledge how everything that happens to me is worth loving in one way or another. That everything happens for a reason, and it is up to me how I choose to see it.
I’m not trying to say we should just consider everything that happens to us as something to celebrate. If you just bought a cappuccino at your neighborhood coffee shop and proceeded to accidentally spill it over your new dress before a meeting, that’s likely not a riveting moment. True story - this happened. What may be cool, however, is the fact you made a new friend in the colleague who offered you a spare outfit, and the barista who offered to make you a second coffee. Of course, you may be wondering - why would you ever want that coffee to spill on you in the first place? Well, obviously, you wouldn’t. But embracing that it did happen, and you made a new friend in the process, that’s cool.
By being a subscriber to my newsletter, you also agree to tolerating my penchant for hyperbolic prose. So, let’s assume you’re feeling a bit Machiavellian as you read this so let’s assume none of your colleagues wanted to help you out. They exist solely to watch you fumble before your big meeting. That’s alright. Maybe you’re on your way home wearing said coffee-stained dress and vow to never again visit this coffee shop so you try a new one the next day. Maybe you even choose to go on a coffee cleanse (dramatic but play along here) and try a new matcha spot the next day. You happen to run into an old classmate after yours after a decade. Re-connection at its finest. Amor fati.
To be honest, the extrapolation above did not happen to me (while the spilled coffee did). But if I were to share a similarly fate-inked anecdote, it would likely be the fact that I had had a busy day of meetings during a 2019 work trip to Beijing and ended up skipping lunch. I was also craving pasta while in Beijing. Resourceful carb-lover that I am, I found an Italian pasta bar nestled in an obscure hútòng of the city. Not-so-subtle ploy but as an occasional human Zagat guide, do check out Mercante next time you’re in Beijing.
Anyway , my elementary Mandarin was, well, elementary at best. My personal phone had no roaming data and my work phone battery was dying. I couldn’t call a DiDi car so I resorted to getting into a rickshaw (now you know the extent to which I will go for a bowl of tortelli). No clue how I survived that rickshaw ride but 45 minutes later during a thrill ride on a highway, I arrived at the restaurant and promptly asked for a vegetarian menu and a table for one. It just so happened there was another diner also asking for the vegetarian menu and a table for one. We ended up getting a table for two. Turns out he was a Rhodes scholar from New Zealand who was working on international environmental policy in Beijing. It also happened that he had popped by the restaurant, struck by an equal craving for Italian, on his last night in the neighborhood. He happened to be staying with a friend of his who worked at a prominent development organization and this was his last night on the block before moving to a new permanent residence the next day.
Three hours later, we finished dinner, our appetites met, and our intellectual cravings satiated after an intense discussion on the COP agreement. We didn’t exchange contact information and all I could think after a speedy farewell was…wow, amor fati. Mind you, my phone was still dead and the owners of the restaurant were lovely enough to call me a taxi and trust that I’d pay them back as soon as I was back to my hotel. But what an incredibly serendipitous story of two international policy-loving youth leaders randomly meeting in an Italian pasta bar in a 衚衕 of Beijing. I think about this story every time I’m dealing with something new in my life and the forces may seem “against” the tide I expected. I’ve had other meaningful coincidences like this one happen since and in every instance, I’ve walked away thinking that’s the part of my life I feel most thrilled about. The fact that I’ll likely always be a bit surprised and there is so much magic to just leaping into it all
I wouldn’t consider myself a particularly adventurous person. I’m ailurophobic (Laura Biscaglia, I promise I’ll one day get over this fear long enough to be in the same 5 KM radius as your cat), I’d never voluntarily sign up to go horseback riding (love the equestrian aesthetic, just petrified of all the ways I could hurt my spine), and I’m likely the one plotting all the back-up plans for (and the ways in which) a date my friend is going on could go awry.
But back to that feeling of infiniteness. I’m not sure if it’s the impressive density of my 20s or the experiences of the last two years but I’ve realized I like to leap. I know the pandemic’s influence on my creativity helped to recalibrate my energies. I also know my last relationship and the intense love and parallel never-again turmoil it came with, has something to do with it too. But there is an ocean out there of all the things that haven’t happened to me yet. I’ve finally warmed up to the idea that not knowing can be better than knowing, and not knowing about not knowing about knowing, that’s even more exciting.
I think about the people I’ve met in the last four years of this past season of life. A lot of love, a lot of hurt, a lot of laughs. It’s been a season of discovery, figuring out what I find comfortable, of thinking about which friends I can speed dial and/or spam when things aren’t so comfortable, of deciphering my own emotional resilience, of achieving success in my professional life, and fundamentally, just living my passions every single day. I don’t have it all figured it out. That’s exactly the point.
But whatever comes my way, I don’t want to change anything. I don’t need to live in my past. I also don’t need to yearn for a cellophaned present. I can just breathe in the future, whatever it looks like, and leap.
It was entirely unplanned that I’m publishing this for your reading pleasure on Bastille Day. But again, amor fati.