I still think there’s something amusing about my missing the 20th anniversary of my arrival in the US as a permanent resident. It happened back in March sometime — I can’t remember the date offhand, but it was somewhere in the center of that month — and, although I was aware that it was coming ahead of time and casually, aimlessly, told myself that I should probably do something to mark such a momentous occasion, I missed it entirely when it actually rolled around. I was too busy with the day-to-day of life, and making sure that more important things were taken care of.
Putting it like that suggests that there was something else of great import happening at the time, some kind of event that was distracting me. Surely, after all, I could only miss the 20th anniversary if another Big Important Thing was taking up my headspace instead. That’s not true, though, to the best of my admittedly faulty recollection; March was simply another month, like so many other months in the last year or so, where the everyday is so packed and busy that things that… well, aren’t really important fall out of your head to make room for the good stuff.
That, at its core, is why I’m so amused and delighted by forgetting the me-getting-to-the-US anniversary. There was a time, and there was a me, not that long ago that would have hyper-focused on marking the date as some truly important, necessary thing to pay attention to, something meaningful. Now, though, I’ve become someone who’s too busy just living life — loving those around me, taking care of them, doing work that makes me happy so I can help support them — to reliably keep track of such things. I am, ironically, doing the really meaningful stuff so much that I’m forgetting about the self-indulgent faux meaningful.