Dear 2025 Ziying,
I wonder if you remember what a strange time you lived in. Absorbing sunlight from the window, moving like clockwork within the same space, looking at masked faces standing 1 metre away. Some days I wake up gasping from broken sleep or lie in bed jittery from reading the daily stats on the news, but when I grope for comfort from the person I love, he can only provide it through pixels and screens. Everyday there are things to be concerned over, things to feel sad about. Yet, you’ve realised that although this bleak and forced confinement has stripped you of things, it has also gifted you some tiny, startling and precious moments.
Before the circuit breaker began, I don’t remember the last time the whole family sat down (and stayed, and talked, and argued, and laughed) for meals so consistently together. Some moments to remember: The way my father briefly closes his eyes when he sips his coffee after lunch. How laughter comes so easily even when talking to friends virtually. My brother bursting into my room so he can practise techniques on me for his medical school exam. Giggling and reading instructions out to my mother as we stand over a pot stirring homemade pearls in a brown sugar concoction (yes for a brief moment bubble tea was banned). The sunsets have been especially gorgeous these few days, and all over Instagram I see other people posting photos of their view. Have the skies become more beautiful to comfort us, or are we just rediscovering an intensified joy in the same old things? Has it always been this satisfying to feel an ice cube melt on my tongue while combatting the afternoon heat? Either way, it has made me happy. There is a lot to reflect on, but perhaps a key reflection for my future self would be: If it is possible in this difficult time where the spaces to find happiness have shrunk, I think you can unearth happiness quite easily in 2025.
You know, I – you – we used to talk about the future incessantly. While there is magic in the imagination, I’ve always struggled to remain in the present, no matter how much yoga I do. I veer wildly from ruminating to dreaming, and the present always slips by me as I drift into a cloud of wishing, hoping, missing. But now, the future feels like a hazy… thing. A gauzy fabric that disappears when I move close and breathe too hard on it. Life in 2020 was going a certain way, and then suddenly we were shoved completely off-course. If I think of the future as how I always have – shaped like a series of goals to achieve – in this cloud of uncertainty where I don’t know when is the next time I can even step foot into office again, I don’t know how to be excited about it. But if I relax my grip a little and let my concept of the future be less shape and more fluid, I know what I’m most excited about. I’m excited for the lessons and pain we have experienced as a society in this virus-laced time to be converted into fresh energy, solid ideas and resuscitated hearts for real change to be implemented. In the youth agency in which I work, the people I admire have always told me from the start: actual, sustainable change can only happen when the systems and communities around the youth are engaged. This pandemic has unveiled a series of social issues which have always been present but squeezed into cracks on our pavements, out of sight and out of mind. I am excited for our society to come together to finally look at the problems that have been quietly ignored and ask ourselves, what can we do?
Writing to my future self has been a funny, challenging and almost meditative exercise. I wish we could meet; you reading this in five years and me typing this on a sleepy weekday afternoon. In five months things have changed so drastically for the world, what more in five years! Will I even like who I have become? I cannot predict how things will turn out, but ideally you are not a boring adult who thinks that laughter is equivalent to noise or ice cream is unnecessary sugar. In case you are, please remember that your imagination has not disappeared, you just forgot it existed. In 2020 you were forced indoors and away from other people, and yet you re-discovered how happiness can blossom in ordinary spaces. When you give yourself the permission to play and the space to hold these tiny moments of beauty close, your inner wonder child will emerge and guide you to find beauty beyond what you let yourself see. If you look up, today the sky is prettier than you realise.