WHAT WE EXPECT
The title for this post only came to me half way through. To begin with it was just one big question mark. Is there an all-encompassing title that would seem appropriate in this situation? I’m fairly certain there’s not. But here I am nonetheless, writing an at first, title-less post with no clear direction of how it should progress.
Just keep writing.
For over a week or more I’ve been uttering to myself (and the other three members of our close proximity household) that I need to write a blog post. Not “need” in the way I used to - “You’re a blogger. You must keep publishing content!” I left that mindset behind with the change in name last year. This time it comes from another more basic need - the one we have that drives us to communicate with each other.
Alongside the familiar pull of turning to writing as a way to shed the normal daily chain of thought for a short while. Hands up who else would like to shake loose their normal thought chain right now?
By the time I find the words and push my thoughts out into the ether, I know so much will have already been expressed about the situation we find ourselves in. The word unprecedented floats over my head on an hourly basis and we have a whole new, wholly unwelcome vocabulary that I’m sure will be etched into as yet unwritten history books.
I know that prior to the unprecedented, every day we were making history in tiny ways but this… well it's not the kind of historical event we ever expected to be participating in is it?
And what we expect is I guess the thing we’re now being forced to examine. We know what we’ve come to expect this far into our lives and we took for granted that we could carry on expecting regardless.
Now that we’ve been handed the unprecedented, gift wrapped in a sheet of hindsight and tied up with string of the unfamiliar, now we realise how lucky we were all along. We realise what we took for granted and how minor most of our daily niggles really were. In the spirit of adapting and reconfiguration, we’re already talking about “a shift” and seeing small hints of what a “new normal” future could look like.
As resourceful humans, we’re asking what we can learn from this when it’s all over. Books will be written based on what we’ve learned and words of wisdom about what really matters will be shared via the medium of blogs, podcasts, social media and most importantly of all, in face to face conversations in the street.
Words pertaining to what's important bounce around in my head all day and so I’ve taken to regularly transferring them to the kitchen chalkboard. Reminders of what’s truly important are truly important like never before.
The words on the board have grown in number since I snapped the photo last week… and yes that is Tom Hanks you see making an appearance. You already know my feelings on a life lived as Tom would live it and so I continue to use him as a barometer for my approach to this… and the rest of life. I know he wouldn’t mind.
On a loop in my head plays a scene from a couple of summer’s ago. I sat at the beach “on duty” at a sufficiently non-embarrassing distance as H and her friends played ball in the sand and swam in the sea after school. The sun bathed us in glorious mid-summer heat and in my earphones there was David Bowie singing Heroes. I remember looking around to take stock and thinking life really is good.
Right now we have a whole new band of heroes keeping us safe, well, fed, watered and striving to provide us with the essential services we need to see out the coming weeks. They are the true heroes in all this and we can provide assistance by staying home, staying grateful, looking after our own vulnerable family and friends and following the guidelines as they’re given.
As for that metaphorical patch of sand at the beach… We’ll get back there again. And when we do, it’ll feel even sweeter than before.
And maybe we’ll have learnt not to expect more than we already have.
