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Start visualising your future to make it happen

Living in Lebanon in 2020 meant losing my life’s savings, my childhood friends and my city itself to a blast and my mother who died from complications after surviving 15 years on dialysis.

Last year wasn’t the easiest one for me although I have survived cancer and wars. The year 2020 was the most intense period I have lived so far.

Living in Lebanon in 2020 meant losing my life’s savings, my childhood friends and my city itself to a blast and my mother who died from complications after surviving 15 years on dialysis.

My friends always describe me as a tough cookie but even the toughest person can break down in such conditions.

It wasn’t long until depression took over my life. I felt completely drained and some days I wished I shouldn’t have survived cancer because I didn’t want to live a life full of pain. Until one day when I received a call from one of my mother’s childhood friends who wanted to check on me.

As we talked, she started to tell me things about my mother’s childhood and teenage years that I didn’t know before, adding that I was so much like my mother Hilda. She said we have one thing in common and that is our love for adventure.

I later discovered a scrapbook that my mom had made of postcards abouts countries she visited or would love to visit. She wrote quotes on each page which also had a sentence in a different language. Which reminded me of my mother’s advice to always learn new languages and discover new cultures.

The experience was as if my mother was telling me: “Hang on, there are still so many things for you to discover, so many countries to see.”

The thing is most of the time life is hard and especially if you happen to be born in this region and in a country like Lebanon. What I learned the most this year is that we should not cling to concepts like happiness or sadness. What really counts in life is the journey of growth and the process that leads us to become our best self.

Finding inspiration from pain is not an easy thing to do but still it is achievable. These days when I feel at my lowest, I grab a random song, learn its lyrics and start to sing.

And these songs from all over the world are also sort of a journey. With the pandemic still forcing us to remain confined before we get our shots of vaccines, I will sing my lungs out songs in Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, English etc.

So, when this is over, I would have picked up new languages, vocabularies and will be prepared for my next journeys. Like my mother did, my scrapbook and travels start from my own home and I don’t need to be in Brazil to know and feel Brazil .

With the Internet, I can visit Brazil with one click, learn about its culture, see the beauty of the countryside, learn Portuguese and dance to the Lambada.

Yes, Covid-19 is wearing us down. Life is being extremely hard with losses of beloved ones or jobs or feeling of insecurity about life and the future mounting, but we need to snap out of this negativity in one way or the other.

The one thing 2020 has taught us for sure is how short and precious life is, so we better invest in our growth, our plans and projects and learning. Investment in ourselves first is our best survival tool.

We can start on a paper or a scrapbook, but we can feel like in a foreign or exotic country, blending in a new culture, picking up a new language and making new friends.

So start visualising! Start realising.

Christiane Waked is a political analyst based in Beirut.