A New Year, New Perspectives, and New Sadness
This week, as many Asian American communities celebrate Lunar New Year, shootings in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay serve as a backdrop.
As the investigations continue, and we send love to the families who lost loved ones, I’m reminded of how important gathering places are for communities of color. They have long offered safe, and brave spaces, where we can be with others who share our history and our lived experiences. But those spaces are often violated, as they were in 2018 at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh; in Orlando in 2016, at the Pulse nightclub, at the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston in 2015, or in 2012 at a Sikh gurdwara in Oak Creek.
I come to this week thinking of all these incidents and many more, of the gun violence epidemic, and of our fragile place in this project called America.
Truth be told, I don’t really have words of reassurance, so I’m going to offer some thoughts about our own healing.
We often focus on January 1 as the be all-end all for starting anew. But with the Lunar New Year, we have yet another opportunity to start again – a new practice, perhaps, that didn’t get kicked off on January 1. Or you could do so on March 21, which is Nowruz, the Iranian New Year; or the beginning of summer or the school year; or Diwali in the Fall.
How can we think of new personal beginnings - a birthday, a new job, a new home, a new city, a new relationship. How each day is an opportunity to begin anew, the morning sunlight sweeping us up in its embrace and melting away the previous day’s fears and anxieties.
We are on a journey toward healing, which is not linear. Sometimes our healing and grieving is a prelude to abundant joy, and sometimes it’s the foundation on which more grief will cement itself.
So let’s take it one day, and one breath, at a time.
Sayu