This is how this morning felt– like there was an endless staircase, only going up, ahead of me. I didn’t really want to run or swim or tackle the long list that awaits me. It’s January and, while I continue to step forward in my life, it’s a lot of work to keep my feet going forward rather than stopping when it feels like this month could be more endless than usual (why can’t it be 28 days like February?).
The losses keep coming– so many deaths, not many from COVID in my life, but from other causes or people who are, well, old and it’s their time to move on. I have the sense that many people aren’t supposed to travel with us in our different world.
We have all changed. The world has changed. I heard a quote yesterday that said, “We have to figure out how to stitch our past to our future.” We have to weave them together without many loved ones, without familiar routines that we miss, and the pieces of our lives we thought would always be there for us. While this virus feels endless, it will end, but everything will not be the same.
We have to find how to make it with this “new” world and “new” life. We need to find our happiness in new things while we’re still grieving all that we have lost. Obviously, seeing how people are struggling to cope, this isn’t an easy task. However, our focus should be on making do with the new rather than continuing to look back at what was and what won’t be again.
We all have choices. We can stay where we are, stuck and unhappy. Or we can grin and bear the discomfort and find a new path ahead of us. What we can’t always see is how great a new path can be. But we must take those first steps to find out.