I awoke this morning to my son telling me the cat was about to jump out the bedroom window of our third floor apartment. I look and there he is, trying to push through the screen. I jumped up and yelled, “Memphis!” which only made him more determined to get out that way. He pushed through the screen and actually popped it out. I don’t know why he didn’t retreat the way he had originally gained access to the window sill. I had to grab him by the tail to haul him in since a giant train table stood in our way. A disaster was averted on New Year’s Day.
The year has barely started and I find myself frozen in time. I feel like I’m on pause. I can’t move forward and I certainly don’t want to look behind me. Maybe it’s all the anticipation collapsing in on me, and everyone saying 2021 will be so much better than the latter.
I can’t help but feel pessimistic. I’m not convinced that 2021 will be the ultimate year of satisfaction and progress. We are in the midst of a pandemic, only less than one year in (give or take, it’s hard to know when it officially began) with a vaccine that we don’t know is effective yet. A friend of mine posted that the Black Plague started around 1346 and didn’t officially end until 1353. That’s six years and between 75-200 million deaths. I feel we still have a long way to go despite our modern medicine and distancing techniques. People are people and we can’t always control the masses.
How can we have hope in times of despair? I mean, sure, it could be a lot worse. We still have safety at home, access to good food and entertainment, and medicine. But even medicine is not guaranteed with our overflowing ER clinics and exhausted front-line workers. People are crying out about their freedoms being oppressed and the vaccine being toxic.
But hope is everlasting, I think it’s in our nature in order to survive. Maybe it won’t be this year, maybe it will be in two or three years, but it is there, just not right now. People are expecting this to be done quickly when really it could take a long time, which is okay. Sometimes we just need to slow down, since the speed of our technological and inventive ways of life have given us much less patience. We are just waiting for the magic wand of this to be fixed by someone and done quickly so we can get back to our normal, pressurized way of doing things.
So we can’t gather in large groups like we used to. I’m okay with that, for now, although I do crave more human interaction in addition to my three-person household. But we need to suffer. Our generations passed have suffered way more than we have. We’ve had it easy. This is nothing compared to what they’ve gone through: world wars, starvation, poverty, severe economic depressions, shelterless, and purely oppressed. People complain about human rights being limited by having to socially distance or wear a mask, when we could have no rights at all.
With suffering comes healing, relief, and learning. We grow and gather knowledge from difficult times such as these, adapting and evolving to create a better life for everyone. We will get through this, it will just take time.
blaak sheep 