Time Flies Forwards

 

At the end of last year, both my glasses and my smartphone needed replacing. The lenses of one were getting blurry, scratched, and yellow; the other one could no long hold a signal and the battery was draining faster than ever. Both of these items were almost four years old, incidentally. I bought them with my mom. That seems so long ago now.

Anyway, before this I always used basic lenses which corrected my myopia and nothing else. My eyesight there has remained unchanged for the last ten years. Heck, the optician said it might actually have improved a little. That’s something to be grateful for. But my astigmatism has only gotten worse over time, no doubt due to all these screens I’m always looking at. To that end, in December I finally bit the bullet and got Kodak City Lenses. These bad boys filter out UV light, blue light from screens, and improve night vision. They were, ahem, a bit expensive. But I feel like I’m seeing clearer than ever.

One thing stood out when I first put them on: even colours looked brighter, sharper. It was both incredible and mildly concerning to take them off and feel like the world grew faded, not just blurry. The view through my new glasses wasn’t just clearer, it was more colourful too.

For the new phone, I got an Oppo A74, which is a decent midrange entry that will no doubt be outdated in a year or two. A phone with 6GB RAM and 128GB internal storage used to be a huge deal; now I’m just glad it runs smoothly with a dozen apps open. I no longer need to be constantly clearing out my photo album to make space. The camera’s not bad either.

So I ended the year kitted out with new and improved ways of seeing the world. They’re an improvement on their predecessors in every way, and I’m already taking them for granted. It’s making me think about filters. We all see the world through viewpoints molded by experience and personality and perspective, which grow and change as life goes on. The one filter which we all have in common is time.

***

It’s 2022 already, huh. I swear the years are going by faster and faster.

So this is the point when I write something reflective about 2021. It was a year of natural disasters, multiple floods and landslides in Sabah and across Malaysia. Climate change is happening, people.

2021 was the second year of the pandemic, and just like 2020, it was marked by recurring lockdowns. Unlike 2020, it was the year that vaccines became widely available. Though a minority of people remain anti-vax for various reasons, ranging from perceived infringement of personal freedoms to concern over potential long-term side effects to outright conspiracy theories about microchips being planted in our bodies (newsflash people, our smartphones already track us and harvest our personal data); the vast majority of Malaysians are now vaccinated. I’m sorry that that isn’t the case in other parts of the world.

It also saw the rise of multiple COVID variants: Alpha and Beta and Delta and now Omicron, these increasingly mutated strains with alternate symptoms and increased infectiousness. Will there be more? Probably. Booster shots are recommended to defend against these new and improved viruses, I’ll be getting mine soon. But by now it’s clear that COVID isn’t going to go away. Wearing face masks isn’t just required by law, it’s become normal social etiquette. We’re all carrying around little bottles of hand sanitizer and scanning QR codes everywhere we go. This is the world we live in now. You can go with the flow, or you can go against it and reap the consequences.

It seems like 2022 will mark the end of the pandemic. Not a sudden ending, but a gradual fading into the background, the latest addition to our rogue’s gallery of familiar illnesses. Only time will tell.

***

It’s funny how when I was a kid, a single year took forever. Now at age 30, I blink and it’s Christmas again. Me and my generation aren’t kids anymore. We’re uncles and aunts and parents. I look at my nieces and nephews and they seem bigger every time I see them. That line about kids growing up before your eyes; it’s all true. But you have to be there to believe it.

In many ways, I like who I am at 30. I’m more confident now, more articulate in person, not just in print. I still get depressed; life gets me down sometimes. But you know what? I’m alive to experience it all. That doesn’t mean I don’t look back in sorrow. I still miss my mom. I wish I could turn back the clock and spend more time with her, knowing now that she’ll die when she’s barely into her sixties. Pardon my language; but fuck cancer.

Life is always bittersweet, isn’t it? You can’t have the good without the bad.

At the same time, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of living life on autopilot, forgetting the dreams you used to have because the day-to-day is all that matters. We have so many distractions nowadays. I still love video games and fully intend to write more about them; but then I haven’t been writing much at all, have I. Too much time spent on social media and not enough on healthier habits. We always believe in the fantasy of tomorrow. Time flies forwards, and none of us have as much left as we think.

So here I am, getting back to writing and spinning just a little bit of order out of chaos. Just trying to do better*. Here’s hoping that 2022 will be better to us all, eh?

 

*Yeah, that was totally a Spiderman reference. Have you seen No Way Home? You need to watch No Way Home.