A Year in Re(ar)view
Savouring the Present
13:37 on a Monday. I am sitting in my bed, with sunlight hugging me through the south-facing French window of our bedroom. I marvel at the view—the shimmer and shine of sun rays on the surface of the sea. It’s super bright, so much so that the horizon looks almost polar white. I savour* the moment.
Look around, look around… at how lucky we are to be alive right now.
—Lin-Manuel Miranda
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*I first heard of "savouring" in 2018. I was attending a doctoral summer school in Valletta, Malta, and one of the participants was presenting her research on foreign language learning among Japanese retirees from a wellbeing perspective.
At the time, I had a toddler and a one-year-old, and savouring seemed so remote from my reality that hearing about it led me to oscillate between my logic-conditioned dismissal—”this is some new-age Eat-Pray-Love BS”—and a half-defeated sentiment of “this sounds like one of those unattainable concepts from Eastern philosophies that you can only experience if you’ve been nurtured like that since birth.”
Reflecting on Life Transitions
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My mind jumps back in time, to the very beginning of this year.
I was sitting in this very room, catching the rainfall that had burst through the building façade and was unforgivingly making its way down our wall. What a way to start the year, we laughed.
We had decided to move back – or, in all honesty, to move forward to Croatia – and were wondering if this was a sign of how things were going to be once we were here again. Not that it would sway us.
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In the five years that we were away, the “zoom out, zoom in” back-and-forth became second nature to me.
I perceive my home country differently now. And, quite unexpectedly, I appreciate it much more. The “zoom out” mode allows me to understand that, in the grand scheme of things (since the 7th century, as one Croatian patriotic song states), it is both futile and unfair to compare it to any of the Western colonial countries that self-appointed critics and internet commentators often cite as aspirational.
If I zoom in a bit from the broad historical view to the past 35 years, I see Croatia developmentally akin to a nation on the verge of puberty—grappling with identity, self-doubt, and change. All the growing pains still present, still felt, still weighing heavily on it. Perhaps most of all, the mentality here feels caught between pride, fear, and resignation—a sense of defeatist attachment to what is, mixed with skepticism toward what could be.
Yet, as I said to an old friend today, I am here, and I remain cautiously optimistic about how it will evolve further.
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Perhaps this habit of zooming in and out would do us all good if we practiced it more often—whether looking at our countries, our histories, or ourselves.
Another friend asked the other day about how the transition has been for us. “The kids are thriving,” I said.
One of them acknowledges this loudly and often; for the other, it’s still a tender wound of being yanked from what’s familiar and transported into something nominally “ours”, yet fully new* to her.
*She is a third culture kid; it’s most certainly a part of her identity we’ll never be able to connect with entirely. I wonder how her experience of cognitively knowing (understanding?) that she’s supposed to belong here (based on the “standard systems” of belonging: nation, culture, language) but not feeling this quite yet can be held gently (and in how many ways I’m already missing the mark…).
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“And how is it for the two of you?”, my friend asked.
“In all honesty, it’s better for us as well.” It’s the little things. My nervous system is not on high alert anymore. Our guards have dropped… No, not fully, ever—but they have definitely relaxed.
We’re savouring— not just the beauty of our surroundings, but also the beauty of interconnectedness. Being abroad made me realise just how much loneliness made me feel anaesthetised. It’s an almost counterintuitive realisation for a self-proclaimed loner like me, someone who’s never really felt like they belong anywhere… yet here I am.
I appreciate the basic human-to-human contact, such as people holding doors instead of pushing through, kids waiting for the school bell together, the fact that I don’t feel unwanted.
Wrap-up and Reframe the Year
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It’s 22:47. I’ve been doing my usual dance of duality*, between the pensive and reflective immaterial me, and the embodied master chef/homework assistant cheerleader.
*Role-hopping as a norm. Maybe that’s what life is?
This isn’t the text I sat down to write… and that’s okay. Almost everything worth mentioning about this year is in here.
Just for fun, I’ll take peek at my end-of-year reflection prompts from last year; I know I had some good ones:
In 2024…
I said yes to… connection.
What became clear to me is… that I need to lean into my intuition more.
In 2025…
I will make sure to… seek out people who might care about similar issues.
I am inviting… more action-taking to accompany all this reflection-making.
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Leaving you with a question this time:
What’s become more important in 2024 and how are you going to cultivate that in 2025?
With kindness in mind, word, and action,
Irena
