Normal Service Resumed

It has been such a long time since I have written on here and during that time the world turned upside down, spun around a few times and has finally started to slow down.

Like the contents of your house after a minor earthquake though, while the ground may have stopped moving, and everything looks fine at first glance, if you look closer, it’s all just a little different. That painting on the wall is slightly askew, the plant in the corner lost a couple of leaves, that chair next to the window moved a few millimetres to the right, and the vase on the shelf that you never really liked, has a tiny crack in it. It’s all somewhat the same but at the same time different.

That is how life feels right now, we are all adjusting to the outside world, dipping our toes in the water and deciding whether we want to dive in. Nervous about the future and wondering if everything will ever go back to normal. But do we actually want life to go back to ‘normal’? The last year or so has been incredibly tough for so many people for a myriad of reasons, and I am not for one second trying to down play that. Some days it was a struggle to see the point in anything, the uncertainty and fear was a heavy burden that weighed us down but let’s try to look for that little silver lining for the survivors.

We were forced to look at our own lives and reassess what was important to us, who or what we missed, we saw who reached out, who cared. We spent more time with our kids, cooked from scratch (or discovered new food delivery services), read more books, learnt new skills (or at least attempted to). We longed to be outside as we started to appreciate a walk in the fresh air, feeling the sun, wind or even rain on our face seemed like a luxury once we were threatened with losing it. We started to grow our own vegetables, bake bread, got up later, and discovered our love of comfortable clothes. We drove each other mad in my house but we were lucky to have people to drive mad and I was always very aware of this fact, knowing others that didn’t. Some days we just survived, other days we thrived, we learned to nurture plants, new pets and occasionally ourselves.

I feel like we hit the reset button and we really need to make the most of it by moving forward with intention. Time may not permit you to continue all your new hobbies and your job might not allow you to continue to work from home every day but think about something positive that came from this time, something really important that you feel had a huge positive impact on your day to day living, and try to keep a little piece of that as life moves on.