Golden Age

Watching Midnight in Paris makes me think, what do I consider as the Golden Age?

Do I love going out dancing and playing dress-up with my BF, exploring every inch of LA with him with kisses and hugs in between? Yes I do. Theme parks galore and city-life dinners, what else is missing?

Do I love being the huntress and off doing whatever I please? Yes I do. Flirting and be flirted all the time, capitalizing on both my singleness and my exotic look.  It was a game, I know. But a game that I enjoy playing.

Do I love driving my little scooter in Bali, feeling the magic and the love of the land? Yes I do. Do I love catching buses and navigating traffic jams in Jakarta, drunk with people's hope and dream? Yes I do.

But do I want to go back to any of those moments? No I don't. Looking at my BF who studiously printed out more Clue sheet because I asked to play board game made me realize this is where I want to be.

This is anything but a romantic story. This is about realizing the good of the moment and enjoying it. It's more than just being content. It's the ability to see things objectively and act on it.

Do I want to go out dancing again? I do. But I can't. My desire and subsequent inability to go out dancing does not reduce the happiness I felt on spending time with my BF during this lockdown. We're both very outgoing and it's good to be able to hog I mean focus on each other.

Do I want to just keep this moment forever? I don't. And I won't. Times will come when we can go out again and live the bright light bright night life I dearly love. Yet that expectation does not in anyway diminish the quality of life I am having right now.

We are living in an unprecedented time, people say. But isn't life is always unprecedented? Nobody knows what the future hold, so obviously the current time is unprecedented. Which is good, because if it is something that we've done before it means we are not making any progress.

Just like the movie, it's easy to dream of a "Golden Age" or "Golden Place". When you don't have to deal with real life pesky details and only see the part you want to see, any place or era is better than where you currently are. 

But change, true change comes from love. It comes from wanting to preserve the beauty that we recognize despite all the flaws. It is not chasing dreams. It is building one. But first we need to accept. We need to love.

There's so much hate and discontentment around it is not healthy at all. We are never as united as we are before as we are now in the wave of hate. What we are hating might differ, but the emotion is the same. The "Golden Age" is as far as our reach as ever. But is it really, though? Or are we just too blind to see it?