What to expect

As we come into and through Advent, I’m thinking about expectation. We’ve been dreaming -- as a family -- about this trip we’re on literally for years. Together, we expected adventure, natural splendor, historical relics, delicious food. But I also held a private if unspoken expectation of myself: to remain a rigid planner, nettled by uncertainty and soothed by spreadsheets. To survive this trip, I expected to plan each element in detail, well in advance. But then Covid happened, upending all kinds of plans for everyone. Obviously, we’re not able to plan this year the way I had planned; we’re not able to lay out a firm itinerary months or even years into the future. Covid has made a family joke of the map that hung on the wall in our house on Los Arboles Avenue for two years, marked up in crisscrossing flight lines of dry-erase pen. Nonetheless, here we are, well along another flight line. So something different -- a different way of holding the future -- has had to come along.

After learning Turkey is an easy place from which to fly to Africa, we initially planned to ferry from Piraeus to Izmir for a Turksih idyll before continuing on to Tanzania, Rwanda, South Africa. (Oh, yes, I know: I am also in the future.) But when the time came to book tickets, the ferry was already done for the season. No matter: we pivoted, we changed our expectations and our plans, we booked plane tickets to Istanbul. Literally a few days later, I woke up to the news of the omicron variant incubating in South Africa. In the space of a day or two, the US and many European countries placed travel restrictions on returnees from several African countries. So now, here we are in Turkey, wondering: if we fly south to Tanzania, will we get stuck there? Will we get sick there? Brian and I look at each other with something like awe: what should we do? Do we still want to go to Africa? Should we go on to Thailand instead? Or maybe reverse course and add South America to our itinerary? It’s disorientating, this realization of so many degrees of freedom but also the reality of profoundly incomplete information. And it dawns on us: it’s always been this way, both the freedom and the uncertainty. There’s nothing unique about this moment except my newborn awareness of it.

Still, I catch myself with expectations that may or may not come to be. I was a bit homesick in Greece last month, so I planned a traditional Thanksgiving meal: roast chicken, stuffing with leeks and chestnuts, mashed potatoes and gravy, my mother’s braised red cabbage. I made broth for gravy and stuffing the day before; I woke up before my family on Thanksgiving to bake a quince and apple tart. By early afternoon, the meal seemed nearly accomplished: the chicken in the oven, the cabbage burbling merrily, the potatoes peeled. But then — surprise! — we blew an antique fuse in our even more antique house, using too many electric burners and the oven all at once. In the dark kitchen, our chicken half roasted, the raw potatoes floating in cold water, the gravy unmade, I confronted my expectations. I took a breath. I poured a glass of wine. I sat under my trusty sleeping bag and waited, without expectation, to see what would unfold. After an hour or two, a stranger appeared at our door. An hour later, another stranger returned with a new fuse. The lights came back on, the cooking resumed. Dinner was delicious.

But sitting under that sleeping bag in the dark, I could see that something new is being born in me. I’m learning to hold the future with a lighter touch, an open handedness I never expected to find in myself. This lightness brings peace in the face of uncertainty but also something else, something better. That new something is hope and -- who’s surprised? -- it has arrived at exactly the appointed time. Hope, released from my expectation, is the trembling, terrifying treasure of Advent. I don’t know exactly how my Advent season will take shape this year, but here in Turkey, wondering about Africa, my heart burns with hope, for Christmas, for our family’s year of travel, for the world to come.

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A New Map