"Hello from Holland"

On embracing my mortality and no longer "waiting for the weekend"!

It’s December again.

And I find myself at an eerily familiar juncture. Standing at the same crossroads as I was 5 years ago (despite being not superstitious, I just can’t help wondering if there is anything special about years that are multiples of 5 :)), staring out into the horizon, filled with uncertainty.

This feeling of “Deja Vu” has been my unwelcome companion for the last few days. A dense winter fog shrouds the view in front of me, as if the universe is telling me to place faith in it, one step at a time.

I’m 35, about to turn 36 in a few weeks. It’s a significant milestone.

I will (hopefully) live to be 70-80 years, which means I am already at the half-way mark. I am reminded of this heartbreaking poem from one of my favorite episodes of television ever, one I cannot watch again without breaking down over an animated horse.

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Although not this dramatic, the analogy still holds to some extent. I am at a point in life where half of it is behind me — immutably etched onto very fabric of time. Half of it lays ahead, teeming with possibilities, but also accompanied with a ticking clock.

We tend to think of years as these behemoths — stretching into weeks and days and hours. They say time is relative (with respect to the frame of reference). And it is. There are days where every minute seems like an eternity. But in hindsight, it seems like everything went by in a flash.

Some years meld into each other, barely recognizable.

(The above is a visual representation of my life.

80 rows of 52 columns each. 4000-odd little boxes (give or take).

That small purple one is today and this week. 2 weeks from now, another row will be complete. Greyed out. Closed. Another “wrapped” or “rewind”.)

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Now, life hasn’t really gone according to plan.

And oh, I had plans.

Detailed ones. With timelines.

And a list of things I wanted to be or have or accomplish. I have always been a hyper-planner. Notebooks and excel sheets and stickies. Nights and nights pored over planning out every possible aspect of my life. This obsession was the outcome of an irrational fear of the unknown. An offshoot of my nomadic childhood — moving from home to home, school to school, city to city. Leaving behind old rooms with music posters and friends with tears in my eyes.

After a couple of decades of being this floating object in space, I wanted some control.

But life has a wry sense of humor. As they say, “the best laid plans of mice and men…”.

The last half decade has been an ordeal. A test of resilience. A trial by fire.

Almost exactly 5 years ago, all of my plans were unceremoniously ripped apart by fate. My anchor uprooted. My compass rendered useless. It took months to find my bearings once again. Days upon days of taking it one day at a time to stay tethered to sanity. Umpteen hours of self-discovery and therapy to reclaim my life — to rebuild, to restart.

And yet, here I stand.

The same crossroads.

But…

I am better prepared this time. I have been out in the fog earlier too and I will navigate it once more. My feet are stronger. I am armed with the knowledge that even this invisible trail will eventually end. If I scrape my knees, I know what to do to assuage the pain.

Bring it on, life! You’re going down in the second round. 🙃

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The title of this post is inspired by this wonderful essay titled “Welcome to Holland”.

I am often asked to describe the experience of raising a child with a disability - to try to help people who have not shared that unique experience to understand it, to imagine how it would feel. It’s like this......

When you’re going to have a baby, it’s like planning a fabulous vacation trip - to Italy. You buy a bunch of guide books and make your wonderful plans. The Coliseum. The Michelangelo David. The gondolas in Venice. You may learn some handy phrases in Italian. It’s all very exciting.

After months of eager anticipation, the day finally arrives. You pack your bags and off you go. Several hours later, the plane lands. The flight attendant comes in and says, “Welcome to Holland.”

“Holland?!?” you say. “What do you mean Holland?? I signed up for Italy! I’m supposed to be in Italy. All my life I’ve dreamed of going to Italy.”

But there’s been a change in the flight plan. They’ve landed in Holland and there you must stay.

The important thing is that they haven’t taken you to a horrible, disgusting, filthy place, full of pestilence, famine and disease. It’s just a different place.

So you must go out and buy new guide books. And you must learn a whole new language. And you will meet a whole new group of people you would never have met.

It’s just a different place. It’s slower-paced than Italy, less flashy than Italy. But after you’ve been there for a while and you catch your breath, you look around.... and you begin to notice that Holland has windmills....and Holland has tulips. Holland even has Rembrandts.

But everyone you know is busy coming and going from Italy... and they’re all bragging about what a wonderful time they had there. And for the rest of your life, you will say “Yes, that’s where I was supposed to go. That’s what I had planned.”

And the pain of that will never, ever, ever, ever go away... because the loss of that dream is a very very significant loss.

But... if you spend your life mourning the fact that you didn’t get to Italy, you may never be free to enjoy the very special, the very lovely things ... about Holland.

So yeah, “Hello from Holland! 👋🏻”

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P.S. Here’s are songs that would be my current mood playlist.