Next week I've got a week off. We're going on 'holiday'. Probably to 'mid-Wales'. Maybe 'Cornwall'. But 'the beach' for sure. Hell, may as well go to 'Thailand'. Tell me how to relax! I can't remember!
Not sure if it was the situation-without-end, the nearly four months of work without a break or the emotional depletion of losing Bunminster this week, but today I crashed. I sat on the settee like a zombie not sure what to do. Couldn't get the old brain to work. Didn't feel like doing anything that might help. Not even the thought of chocolate could get me moving. My bones felt heavy and floaty at the same time. There were grunted responses to difficult questions I can't answer, like, 'Do you want a tea?'
I need to stop.
This quote hit a nerve today when I was thinking how impossible it is to plan for the future anymore. It's a link to a piece in The Atlantic highlighted in one of my favourite, irregular Tinyletters from interesting women: Megan O-R's 'Something in the Woodshed' (salut slag!):
"Five hundred years ago, Copernicus re-centered the universe away from us, outward. The COVID-19 outbreak is a reminder: The world isn’t for us; we are part of it. We’re not the protagonists of this movie; there is no movie. After all the suffering and wreckage have subsided, one good thing for our long-term viability will be to have changed our ways of thinking. To have regained a humility."
Charles Yu, The Atlantic
Yes, illusions about life are being shattered daily and everywhere but the bonus is, hopefully, that we get to live, to prevail as a species. Yu wonders if life before Covid-19 was perhaps the unreal, non-normal one where we thought there would be stability through relative predictability. But we can make no more assumptions about going back to that or about what is to come.
Watching Terminator hasn't helped my mood. Bottom line: we are here to survive. The primary directive. Even if we humans are bad for the planet. We do, however, have a chance to think bigger and do things differently. That's the hope bit.
Anyways, today I got a laugh out of this young lady on a uke … it pretty much sums up today but it's also utterly marvellous.
https://www.tiktok.com/@makeshift.macaroni/video/6811322581883440390
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