The Seventh of May

 

Dear Blog Readers

I don’t know who the majority of you out there are, but I know there are people in various parts of the world reading my blog posts. Maybe some of you are new readers, and some, hopefully, are regular ones. Thank you for reading.

My blog posts have diminished in the past little while. At first, I used to blog weekly, and now it seems to have dropped to twice a month or so.

I’ve been asking myself (as well as discussing with a few other bloggers), what is it that keeps us/me blogging? During the COVID years, when I walked for hours, thoughts would arise and I would return home, flip open my laptop and bang out a blog post. Or a book I’d read would send me off on another tangent of thoughts that I felt I HAD to tell you about.

Now, the urge to blog seems less urgent. And I’m wondering why. Is it because I have nothing to say? Have my thoughts dried up? Or has the world at large been so filled with a bombardment of news that it’s become too much to decipher and distill?

I’m still reading a lot and still writing (working on a couple of novels as well as dabbling in poetry and some essays), still painting and playing tennis and pickleball, and soon I’ll be hopping across the pond to Amsterdam (for a week, so you can expect a post-trip account). I’m now fully retired (six months and counting), so I should have plenty of time (and thoughts) to blog more frequently. But still, for some reason, I resist. And maybe that’s okay for now.

An Important Anniversary:

May 7^th is the anniversary of the date I arrived in Canada as a landed immigrant. Forty-five years ago! 

That number seems staggering to me (as does my age). I have lived in this country for forty-five years, and I still remember the day I arrived. I mark it every year with a feeling of immense gratitude and relief. Yes, relief that this is where my father was determined to bring his family. 

Even as young kids, growing up as expats in an Arab country, we knew that my father’s intention was to emigrate to Canada. “Take French in school,” he urged us. “We’re going to Canada one day.” So around 4^th or 5^th grade, I switched from Arabic as a second language to French. Of course, I never did master French, apart from a school-girl vocabulary. And after we arrived in English-speaking Ontario, I didn’t utter a word of French. 

But my father had a vision and a plan, and he carried it through. I wonder if I would have done it on my own? There are some decisions that are made for us that determine the path of our future. If I had not arrived in Canada, where would I be now, and more importantly, who would I be? What place would I call home?

I’ve written about ‘where is home’ before (here), and some of my childhood past (here and here). 

But that past seems so long ago, I wonder how much of it is part of me anymore. Yes, it shaped me into who I am today. But do any of those past remnants of who I was, remain today? 

There was a trend going around on social media about meeting your younger self for coffee. I wondered which younger self I would meet and what I would say to her? Would I meet my naïve 16-year-old self? My unformed 22-year-old self? My married-and-anxious-new-mother 33-year-old self? Or even my should-be-mature-and-wise-by-now-but-not 50-year-old self? All those ‘selfs’ were at such different stages, each one changed from the previous one. I would not know what to say to any of them other than: just be yourself and don’t overthink it. You’re going to be okay. Because even though much has changed, if there’s one thing that has endured over the years, it has been over-thinking.

But here I am today, in this country for 45 years and it is my home. I cannot think of myself as identifying with any other country, not even the country of my birth nor the country of my heritage. 

When I travel to the Netherlands, a huge Canadian ally; I watched the recent celebrations there of the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Netherlands and their enormous gratitude to Canada), I will be wearing my Canadian flag pin. I don’t think I’ll ever travel again without it.