Divine Intervention
It was 4 weeks ago today that I received a notice of eviction from my landlord. By the well-debated rent control ordinance, the landlord can evict a tenant in good standing for a few reasons, one of which is that either the landlord themselves or their direct family members moving into the property occupied by the tenant. That was our case. When I wrote about it, I had so many kind and sympathetic responses that touched me.
As I’ve written for the last few weeks since, I’ve been meeting this time of change with curiosity and wonderment. This may be an opportunity to make the change we’ve wanted to make for some time. It must be a blessing in disguise, as they say. THEN, look what happened to the country in the last 7 days. Even though we were already feeling the uncertainties with the news of the COVID-19 coming closer and closer to us, I think most of us were really shocked by the graveness of the situation.
Yes, it’s really unsettling without knowing how long this is going to last; if we or any of our loved one may get sick; how it’s going to affect our livelihood (if it hasn’t yet); what’s going to happen to our life as a whole! Now that we are several days into this mayhem, though, I started to see emails and social media posts that remind us of goodness that’s coming out of this global crisis. I can’t help but sense this pandemic is actually a Divine Intervention so that the world would finally come to PAUSE when it was spinning out of control at many levels. It’s time for each of us to pause and reflect, appreciate what we have, and think about what’ really important to us.
Before last Thursday, knowing that I would be staying mostly in the mountains within a couple of weeks, I was starting to stress out about driving back and forth to the city to attend my business as my calendar was pretty full with activities in the coming weeks. Now it looks like everything is either cancelled or happening on the video conferencing platforms, and I can still attend most of my business needs from the mountains. It would be a much better place to “self-quarantine” where we don’t have neighbors on top of each other. How lucky am I? Well, as the farmer said in the Chinese Farmer’s parable, “May be, may be not…”