If you somehow haven’t already guessed, I’ve been excited big-time for this trip.
The first 10 days or so flew by in a blur. Traveling as a family of six, changing cities every other day, constantly seeing new things, and barely sleeping — it was a whirlwind.
Mom and I obviously needed some time to recover once the rest of the family left, but since then we’ve been out and about again too, albeit at a slower pace. While it sometimes feels like we’re not doing much, on a higher level we’re content. We’re still seeing and learning new things, and there's plenty more to come.
But then, something like today happens, and everything else goes out the window.
My maternal grandmother, who I call Nani, has been unwell for the past couple of months. It started with a persistent cough but it just never went away, leaving her weak, tired, and frustrated.
The doctors haven’t been able to correctly diagnose her, and recently, she developed a new symptom that raised some red flags for my dad, who is a doctor himself. Today, he took her to the hospital for some tests.
When Nani first fell ill over a month ago, mom went and stayed with her for a few nights. Tonight, being so far away, she was helpless. And I could see it was getting to her.
It was an obvious decision that if the test results raised any concerns (which we would know soon enough), we’d both fly back home immediately. Even if everything turned out fine, I suggested that mom go anyway. I could see how much it hurt her to not be there for Nani, and I knew I’d feel the same if it were mom in that situation.
Despite how much I had been looking forward to this trip, when the possibility of cutting it short came up, there was no hesitation. Sure, we were on the mother-daughter trip of a lifetime, but with everything happening back home, staying here seemed daft.
In a way, I expected myself to feel some regret — to feel bad about cutting the trip short. If we were having to do it for any other reason, I’m sure I would’ve.
But in this case, my mind immediately went into overdrive rationalizing it. I’d already seen everything I wanted to see, and honestly, I was starting to get bored anyway (which wasn’t true, but in that moment, it felt like it). It was like when we didn’t get the apartment we’d booked for a month, but we rationalized it as a blessing in disguise — because we’d get to travel more.
I’ve noticed in retrospect that when things don’t go according to plan, they usually turn out for the better. I’ve seen it in my life before — like when I didn’t get a full scholarship for the Astrophysics program at the University of Toronto that I was secretly extremely optimistic about and had hyped myself up to go, but it ended up being for the better because the guilt of giving up the scholarship would’ve kept me from making the pretty early decision to switch my major to Computer Science — the field I’m currently thriving in.
I realize that seeing everything in such a positive light this way is just my brain making disappointment easier to digest, and often it’s probably not objectively the better outcome. Is it a good thing? Probably not always, but in the general case I suppose so. It helps me avoid regret. There’s no point wondering how life ‘could have been.’ It’s better to learn to be happy with how things are, and I think I’ve trained my brain to do that without me even knowing it.