A reminder to do what I can, with what I have, where I am, while I embrace my circumstances…
It’s the last day of April 2020—for a month and a half now I’ve been sequestered in an apartment in Yerevan, Armenia after my plans to volunteer at TUMO were disrupted by the COVID-19 lockdown. In the space since March, I’ve observed the sonic cityscape evolve from human noise pollution to bird symphonies and I’ve creatively documented it along the way through sounds and visuals. Some images are included here while the sounds will come later.
Admittedly, I’ve been incredibly fortunate in this lockdown, I’ve always been an introvert, I’ve always been delighted to be by myself, and I’ve always been bored to tears with politics and news, so letting the latter pass me by while I was obligated to be alone was essentially what I would have been doing anyway. With my family and friends safe all I could do was work on myself.
That said, there were some obstacles but what I found is that they weren’t the obvious ones I thought they were initially—instead they were assumptions in my head—assumptions that I didn’t have the right equipment to do the things I wanted. In fact, there were several instances where I thought I couldn’t do something because of physical resource limitations and as it turns out I could do them all with what I had on hand, and I finally did.
The specifics of these cases don’t matter, what does matter is realizing that you should do the best you can, with what you have, where you are, while accepting your current circumstances rather than rejecting them. And there’s always a way; restraint breeds creativity. What’s more, I found it important to remind myself that I’m solely responsible for my experience in the world—I may not be able to control what happens to me but I can control my reaction to it. So on the other side of this, even now, I’m working to be better than I was before.