For as long as I can remember (which is probably not as long as I imagine it to be but still long enough), I have been led by the following words in thinking about the future:
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.
Surely these are not the only words that I am led by, but I vividly remember the moment when I heard them for the first time, and then the moment right after when I processed and understood what these words really meant. It was one evening at the office of the Center for Leadership Development, right off of Abovyan Street in Yerevan, during an inspirational flow of thoughts being shared by the center’s founder, Stepan Avanesyan. More than one phrase has left the walls of that office having found a fertile home in the minds of my peers and myself, and this is but one of them.
And so, for as long as I can remember, I have been planning. And the course of the coming months of this year would be no exception.
You see, as far back as summer of 2019, the groundwork for the summer months of 2020 was being laid. My apartment lease would conclude end of April 2020, my car lease would end two weeks after that, which would give Aida and me the financial and physical liberty to depart Los Angeles and travel as if boarding the next bus to wherever we felt like stopping.
But Aida knew only part of this plan. She would find out only in February of this year, at an elevation of 8,500 feet above the sea amongst the evergreens of Mount Whitney, that I wished to ask her one very special question, and that question had been on my mind since spring of the year prior. And so by the end of that month, having received Aida’s այո՜ (“yes!”) moments before it started to snow in California, the equation of 2020 got that much more exciting: wedding in June, honeymoon through Europe, and a month-long stay in Paris (maybe more if we felt like it… because, pourquoi pas?). We had carefully counted the number of days and confirmed that by the time we departed Los Angeles, Aida would have already received her U.S. citizenship.
The wedding date was meticulously set to accommodate the work schedules and academic years of family members and friends who would be travelling from around the world to Armenia to participate. A bit too soon, and it would be before graduation; a bit too late, and the weather would be unbearably hot. This week doesn’t work because a part of the family won’t be in town, and that weekend won’t do because the flights don’t work out. Harnessing the power of modern technology (as in, Facetime) and leaving behind a calendar covered with red pen marks, the date was set.
After Aida had zigzagged the four corners of Los Angeles looking for the perfect wedding dress and finally finding the one, after the date and time of the church ceremony had been set, confirmed, and reconfirmed, after the photography and video crew had been hired and the advance made, after the live bands and musicians had been shortlisted, after family and friends had purchased tickets or pre-selected their flights, and after construction had commenced to expand the wedding venue to accommodate all guests, just as Aida and I were setting up the camera to record our video invitation, so spread the news and came the reckoning that the coronavirus is not “just a flu,” that instead it’s a virus worthy of a lockdown and a shelter-at-home.
I would open the Airbnb app several times a day in my idle time (including at the toilet, yes), and slide my thumb over the arrondissements of Paris, clicking each available unit one after the other to daydream what a month in the city of lights would look like from its virtually nonexistent balcony, to see what cafes dotted the streets below for people-watching, and check how far it was from the closest metro station. Our favorite ones I would send to my uncle living in Paris, Tsolak, for his expert opinion (“the unit is on the sixth floor, but I didn’t see any mention of an elevator” came his verdict more than once). Now each time my thumb slides over my phone screen, I pause for a moment above the Airbnb app and consider deleting it for now.
The plan that had been in the making since summer 2019 faced a contingency that I had not accounted for: a global standstill. Within the course of days, the world and life as we know it changed for all of us.
The wedding will likely not take place in June; we haven’t made the call yet, holding on instead to the last threads of possibility before making a decision that would affect many more people than just us two. We probably won’t spend July honeymoon-hopping along northern Europe, and that month in Paris (if it is to be in the Paris that we long to live in) won’t be until much later.
Late one March night, before calling it a night, I log on to my Aeroflot account to see if our late-April flights – booked in January – were still on. Aeroflot had cancelled them; it wouldn’t be another couple weeks or so until they called to formally notify us of the cancellation. A week after that, the night before making a 6:00am drive to the USCIS for Aida’s naturalization interview, we log on to the system and find out that all offices are closed until end of April, and notices for new interview dates will go out only in May… when, in all likelihood, we will already be out of town.
Via Facebook, Ani and Tatev from ImpactHub ask if I’d like to turn the week-long legal workshop that we had been planning into an online webinar instead; I suggest we hold it off until we can do a live event, since as much as technology has advanced, you simply cannot reproduce online that electricity and intimacy and feeling of community that is only achieved when warm bodies and minds populate the same physical space.
Wrapping up three years of your life in a new city isn’t always a smooth and straightforward task, and the hurdles of coronavirus make it that much more adventurous. Returning a leased car when the dealership is closed is a test of navigating bureaucracies and keeping track of phone numbers to know which leads where and which leads to a dead-end. Cancelling utilities and storing furniture, changing mailing addresses and updating bank accounts, wrapping up phone plans and insurance plans, too, taken separately, do not seem like difficult tasks. Not at all… until you realize you have to call in to make the change and find out that wait-times are “extremely long,” as one bank put it. So you sit back, put the phone on speaker, and listen to tacky waiting-room music for forty-six minutes, interrupted every two minutes by a mockingly sweet female voice that responsibly reminds you that all of their specialists are busy assisting other customers, and that your call is very important for them, and asks you to stay on the line as the next available specialist will be right with you. And every time she says “right with you”, you wonder whether you should laugh or lament.
Actually, neither. Being the test of patience that this is, you simply turn off all your temperamental senses and start your initiation rite to becoming a Tibetan monk. And not only in regards to these calls, but in regards to life at large. Of letting go of your surroundings but hanging on to your senses, of remaining in control of your actions but losing control over their results, of letting things around you just be, as you yourself just be.
You see, over the past several weeks, another phrase has made its way into the back of my mind, and I catch myself repeating the same words over and over again at different times throughout the day, as if my inner voice seeks to console me with the soothing waters of truth. The words are from a popular song by Robbie Williams.
I sit and talk to God,
and He just laughs at my plans.
And I realize that when this happens, the best you can do is to sit next to God and laugh along with Him.
Chronicles 