Having moved to Liverpool, I’m now adjacent to a rather significant Chinatown. And thanks to a trip to the Museum of Liverpool and some reading over at Visit Liverpool, I can confirm that:
Liverpool is home to the oldest Chinese community in Europe. It's also home to the largest Chinese Arch outside of China.
Exciting no? Well, given it was Chinese New Year this weekend I thought it would be worth checking out the celebrations. And what a good job I did. Not only did I see some sights, I also had my new year and its new opportunities revived from the slumber of grey January.
The nub of the new
To be honest, the fact I even made it down to Great George Street was a reclamation of all things resolution. A mere four weeks ago I had pledged to spend the year being led by the heart. And yet, a lack of sunlight and a dearth of festivities, commonly associated with this time of year, meant my tired legs and atrophying brain were talking me out of a lot.
On Sunday though, I had a stern word with myself and stepped out the front door, on a mission to see something new, determined not to miss out.
I saw dragons and lanterns and wondered around unfamiliar streets made even stranger by traffic cordons and soot-besmirched patches of firecracker debris. It was rather wonderful.
Certainly the idea of a second chance to start afresh was invigorating too. My fortune, still unfolded, was no longer derailed by my sluggish crawl through January. Huzzah.
But there was something else. Something about this new style of new year celebration in a new city had got me thinking.
The freedom of the new
Newness is a great tool for reviving a tired mind or a tired routine. Whether it’s getting out of your comfort zone or wiping the slate clean, newness is a panacea.
There’s a quote I’ve been carrying around for a few years. It stuck because I like the idea that, while new can be uncomfortable, it can also give you the opportunity to unshackle yourself from the parts of yourself you’re not so keen on. Or at least re-draft them.
There is something freeing in seeing yourself in a new context. People have no pre-conceived notion of who you are and there is relief in knowing that you can re-create yourself. When you’re entrenched in a community of people who know you, it’s scary to proclaim wanting to be different and wanting to experiment. - Carrie Brownstein, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl
It certainly is scary to try and be different when your identity is set by the expectations of those around you. I suspect many have felt something similar; it’s akin to being in a rut. It is to be stuck somewhere, or as someone, not so great, but familiar.
Moving to a new city was a chance for me to once again de-contextualise and re-draft. But I think I got it slightly wrong when we first got here.
Losing touch
In an effort to shake off the rut, break out of the identity slump and get fired up again, I was trying to define myself only by the new. It felt like the past had brought me to my pre-move slump, so I threw the baby out with the bathwater. I built a wall around the past.
In essence, I misunderstood Emile Zola’s warning in The Masterpiece:
He knew that he should never have gone back. The past was but the cemetery of our illusions: one simply stubbed one’s toes on the gravestones.
I took Zola to mean you shouldn’t revisit the past. That looking back only causes you to stumble. Thinking that way meant I started to lose all the little pieces that accumulate over time to make your sense of self, leaving nothing to re-draft.
Going back to what once engaged you or brought you joy can bring you face to face with the failure of those joys to last or your failure to make the most of them. In other words, it forces you to confront your illusions of what they were or what they meant.
I realise now, it’s not the past that’s dangerous, but our illusions. Or put another way, it’s not the things you loved or the things you did that hurt you, but the expectations you have built up around them.
You can’t pick up where you left off
Having been in a creative and expressive funk for a while, and realising my approach was misguided, I started to look back to see what I could salvage. All sorts lay gathering dust in the corner with my discarded selves: being a Prince fan; loving Starbucks; studying nonfiction; the New Yorker; Radio 4; the thrill of gigs; American politics and more.
Trouble was, when I tried to dust these elements off and try them on again, they no longer seemed to fit. They just weren’t doing for me what they once did. And then Laurie Lee came to mind:
“But being less used to the brandy, it would sometimes hit me hard, till I found myself staring at the room in a wonder. I’d see a gypsy come in wearing a great red mouth as though he’d bitten into a harvest moon. Such were moments of that pure, almost virginal intoxication, to which all subsequent drinking tries in vain to return.” - Laurie Lee, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning
Of course I couldn’t pick these things up expecting them to fit as they once did. Over time they had changed, dated, or evolve. So had I. They were no longer new. And having claimed them once, I could never again encounter them afresh.
My illusions of what they were weren’t going to match what they are now. But I couldn’t uncouple those elements of self from the expectations around them. I was stuck.
The weight of expectation
Struggling and searching for advice, someone suggested I go back to the last time I felt a fire, a spark: the hunger. And rather than looking at just the subject, look at the circumstance too. Why did you get so fired up or spend so much time on something?
Because instead of expectations, I had only curiosity about where something would take me. I was insatiably curious and open-minded to unexpected adventures or pleasures. Some of that is simply the fortune of youth. Fewer responsibilities or social pressures make it easier to dive in unencumbered.
But you can age before your time and it’s all too easy to internalise all those pressures and responsibilities and tell yourself you to expect more. Or at least expect something - anything. Expectations kill experience. Curiosity creates it.
Curiosity killed the rut
Brownstein didn’t suggest it was freeing to redraft your self in new circumstances. But rather, that it was freeing to see your self in new circumstances.
And this takes us back to my Chinese New Year. I didn’t know what to expect. I wasn’t even entirely sure that I would go. But since it had no comparison point, it was worth a punt. And while some I was with bemoaned it was smaller than they thought it would be, or the day was grey and cold, I thought it was wonderful.
And since I didn’t really know the traditions either I wasn’t worried about resolutions or expectations for the year ahead. I could enjoy a fresh start without the compulsion to overthink what I should do with it. And that is perhaps what was so great about Sunday.
Seeing the celebrations for Chinese New Year reminded me how to enjoy things - new or old. And it showed me how to get to know myself again. No hope, no fear, no weight: just wide-eyed curiosity.