It’s almost been a year since I started this blog site. The format of the website I chose has changed (something with a company change – I don’t understand that side of things) so logging in and getting started again was tricky, but that’s just an excuse. As I wrote in the few posts on this blog site previously, I have found establishing habits difficult, and have found taking time to be still– particularly for myself– even harder.
The Coronavirus quarantine began as two weeks, then morphed into a lifestyle we became used to over the next five months. We did puzzles, played cards, tried new board games. We rode bkes as a family and discovered the creeks near our house. We found crayfish, so many crayfish — small ones, giant ones. We gathered around simple backyard campfires thankful for a few genuine friends, seldom joining any outside our immediate family. Zoom became a regular form of communication. Brothers who started out fighting became friends and learned to play together better than ever before — made forts, hiding places, caught insects, set up races down the driveway and invited parents to be the pit audience, swam in the little pool in the backyard with the neighbor friends (now felt like siblings), and danced to Turn Down for What around a waterslide slicked with dish soap. The windows open, there were always happy kids running through, and the days were just about perfect thsi summer for a 7 year old, a 9 year old, and their mom (dad too when he was able to take a break from work) and seemed to have no end in sight. We knew the world outside our world was hurting; we talked about it and prayed together and cared for it but took shelter in the goodness of our microcosm of laughter and hugs and safety.
Mid-August came with a surprise that quarantine could not continue and my career would not be done remotely . I’d go face to face with people again — but with all the hate in the world right now in 2020 and having learned that many on one side of the political spectrum are decent seeming beings in one regard yet hold fast to those same “ideals” the party of hate pays homage to ….. this nugget was now permanently lodged into my thoughts as I ventured out of the safety of quarantine to my own encounters with those persons who someitmes mask the hate under the guise of something more palatable, like patriotism or religion (no religion truly wants to be like that, do they?) Not necessarily having the words, but especially not having the forum to voice even the emotions, my heart may as well have been squeezed and wrung out to dry on a clothesline.
I looked at my children whose legs had grown longer and wondered had I done enough to capture my gift of time with them these past five months. Their interests, their personalities, their vocabularly, their insight, their hopes, their perspectives…. all changed over the past five months. These two boys are precious and yet do my husband and I hold on to each moment enough? Or are the moments too often lost by the moments we need to correct, reprimand, remind, pick up after, make dinner for, and all the do-ing? Learning to be still is a balance of learning be-ing , not losing it in the do-ing, all the while accepting it will be now only for this moment. As the author of “Crazy Busy” writes, “we must take this time now or it will be taken from us.”
Being given a surprise gift of quarantine (two weeks that you, reader, may assume are not what you would consider a gift by the definition of all these two weeks have entailed,.,,) in late September into the start of October, was just the kick in the seat of the pants I needed to remember, once again, the lessons taught to be those five months earlier this year. The lessons of be-ing with family more than just do-ing and take-ing this time now, not later, to hold onto and, yes, to write now – have sunk in finally just enough that here I am, tonight, starting to blog again. My heart is full.