Making peace with my pandemic brain

 I think I'm suffering from a pandemic brain, but it's going to be okay...I hope.  

Hello, remember me?

I unintentionally took a month off blogging. It’s not like I didn’t try - I started blog posts here and there, but I couldn’t finish them. As I explained to my husband, it’s like I wanted to say things and then I didn’t want to say anything.

I haven’t been making much art either – just a drawing here and there. Could this be a creative block? 

Backseat bird watching

We were driving in the car one weekend last year when my then almost-four-year-old was unusually quiet. He was deep in thought about something, staring out the car window. 

“The birds don’t have to wear masks?” my son suddenly asked. He’d been watching the birds flying above, landing on walls and street lights as masked people walked by along the pavements.  

“No, they don’t,” I said. 

“They’re lucky,” he said. 

Shoo, this pandemic has flipped our world upside down. I typed this out months ago and saved it so that I wouldn't forget how a virus could make us question everything. 

Photo by Viktor Keri on Unsplash

P.S. You might enjoy reading The small things are the big things. 

Finding a rhythm for 2021

I quit making resolutions probably about the same time I had a baby. Life becomes rather unpredictable when you have kids and I was done with setting lofty goals that made me feel inadequate rather than empowered.

Over the last few years, I sometimes come up with a word or a phrase for the year that relates to some areas of my life I would like to improve. Last year, my phrase for the year was ‘lighten up.’ It encompassed the ideals of living more joyfully by streamlining mundane tasks, spending more time investing in friendships, having more fun and yes, rather predictably, losing a little weight. And then COVID-19 hit us.  

It was hard to lighten up in 2020 and, since I still feel like I’m learning how to do this, I didn’t want to come up with a phrase or word for the year. But it came to me regardless – rhythm.

Are we playing for an audience?

How much we do or do not do because we thinking about an audience - real or imagined?

Last night, my husband was telling me how international soccer has started up again, in stadiums without fans due to the pandemic. It means no more cheers, songs or booing from the crowd. Then he mentioned a stadium that put cardboard cut-outs of people in the stands – a fake audience.

Thinking about the effort taken to make faux fans for a stadium got me thinking about how much we do or do not do because of the presence of an audience - real or imagined.

Before he mentioned this, I had been composing an Instagram post with a collection of images only to decide not to post it. This happens often – I question the quality of the content and then why would I need to post it. The moments were lived, the images taken and the memories saved, but does it have to be shared? Do I need an audience for it?

Social media’s split personality

This has been a question on my mind for years as I grapple with my love/hate relationship with social media.

On one hand, it’s a great way to connect with people, share ideas and inspiration and be inspired while simultaneously being a vehicle of distraction and narcissism. This is social media’s split personality.

When I’m online, I try to stay on the good side of it – follow people who inspire creativity rather than envy, share honestly and respectfully – but I still wonder if I’m falling for a time and soul-sucking vacuum.

I don’t have ‘the answer’ to social media  – I’m no hypocrite and admittedly love scrolling Instagram, but I do think it’s important to keep social media in perspective. 

Not everything needs to be shared to be important. And sometimes, the time spent sharing and scrolling can stop the doing of what's important.

Related: The small things are the big things

Into the wild - before lockdown

We don't know what freedom is until it's taken away. 

This was our walk on Tuesday. We're usually avoid hiking because of crime and having a toddler, but we braved it because we wanted to keep physical distance from other people. On that little hike, I said, "After lockdown, we have to do this often, and invite friends so we can walk together." If it weren't for the loaming house arrest, we wouldn't have done this, we would have stuck to the safe and the known, the less wild.

But things are going to get wild. Without us around who knows how the plant and animal life in parks, forests and beaches will flourish.

And thanks to an extreme reduction in road traffic, we are going to benefit from massively reduced air pollution levels (please let someone be studying this). Mother nature is reclaiming herself. She's having a spa day for 21 days. She deserves it. We deserve it. It's the least we can do.

#gratitudeduringlockdown #lockdownsouthafrica #gratitudejournal

The small things are the big things

A few weeks ago, I woke up uncharacteristically early and decided to watch the sunrise. I throw clothes over pj's, took my coffee and walked down the road, greeting early morning runners on route. I must have been quite a sight with wild morning hair and coffee cup in hand.

The sunrise was worth it. 

I tried to be quiet because I was already freaking out about the coronavirus, but I couldn't really talk about it because I sounded like a hypochondriac. I am, but I've also been expecting this since I watched an Oprah show way back about how scientists predicted a virus will mutate enough to cause a pandemic. At the time, they thought it would be bird flu (it could still be). I also looked at how fast the numbers climbed in China and I just knew this was going to hard to contain.

I was grinding my teeth in my sleep freaked out. And then I watched the sunrise and felt like God was saying, stop to notice the big things. In that moment, the sunset was so big, the sky a show of colour changing every second. It was a performance. One I hardly ever attend, something sidelined as small. I thought of my child when he was born. He was tiny (2,4kg), but the first moment I saw him, roaring in his deep voice, he was the biggest thing in the room. Sometimes the smallest things are the biggest things.

Right now, something so small that we can't even see it is causing big changes in our lives. Its horribly scary but it's also a reminder that the small things could be the big things.

Job stress, workloads, deadlines, career success all loom like big things over us, taking up so much headspace, but in comparison to our family, health, creativity and the wonder of nature they are the small things.

A little Christmas miracle.

Yesterday evening, we cleaned our yard and put up solar-powered fairy lights. 

We lost track of time and before we knew it it was almost 8pm and we had a very tired 3-year-old. He wanted the lights to work, but they needed 12 hours of sun to charge first (according to the box). E lost his mind. He was screaming and crying for the sun. I explained that we can't make the sun come up - it's God's work. He said he wanted God to change the world (we took him to the planetarium so I think he remembered about the world moving around the sun). 

Long story short, in the bath he cried to his dad about why he couldn't see God and why couldn't God just come here. Emotions were wild. How do you explain this to a 3-year-old when you don't know either. So I was honest, I said that as old as I am, I don't understand everything about God either, but I do know that God shows himself in different ways.

I went to fetch something we left outside and our tree lights were magically on. So I showed E and told him that God heard him crying for the tree lights, and even though they shouldn't be working, God made them work to show him that he is real and he listens. E, full of wonder and awe, said, "God heard me and changed the world." 

Yes, He did.

P. S Don't ruin it by telling me some logically reason for the lights to work, I prefer a little Christmas miracle.

The Christmas Rush

I'm starting to feel that frantic rush to get everything done before Christmas. 

I have to remember that done is better than perfect and presence is more meaningful than presents (that's a good thing cause I think I am a crappy gifter). Oh, and to purposely slow down.

Pic from back in November inside Helderberg Nature Reserve, Somerset West during our first family mini-vacay.