Begone 2020!

That phrase “Be careful what you wish for” comes to mind.  How we are so filled with hope and optimism that we dismiss an entire calendar year believing a(nother) calendar date will make it all better.

Remember the millennium?  People stock-piling food … planes would fall out of the sky … computers would stop working … At the same time as planning the biggest New Year’s Eve parties ever.  Hard to remember now – even just a few more calendar dates on.  Nothing much changed at all.

And today a political row simmers.  The European Commission deciding the hallowed “Irish Agreement” (which caused howls of indignation when the UK dared to say parts might be over-written) – now less than just one calendar month after all the plaudits – finds the EU doing just that itself for real AND over “it’s not fair” covid vaccines.  One hasty political backtrack later I am left clear in my mind that the jab is not the answer we all believed it would be either.  Not for ages anyway.

Our daughter is due to give birth in a week or two.  Yet the hospital process of birthing is now secondary to the needs of covid restrictions.  Appointments with her husband a lottery, togetherness now at the whim of local decision-making decision-makers, post-birth family support a guilty decision for all whether to break rules or not (and always full of “what if” Rona fears).

And the backend of 2020 “of course we will” 2021 holidays abroad confidence now looking less and less confident.   And so the staycation holidays will cost more and more and come with less and less availability.  Who could have known?

Lockdown here and still recording horrendous covid stats: positive cases in the tens of thousands, daily deaths still over 1,000, so many left to vaccinate – so little vaccine!  So many lives broken and grieving, so many “long covid” lives still broken without an end in sight.  So many incomes and lifestyles massively impacted.  Wellbeing more and more eroded.  Normal still something we hope might return – just now we think it might be (should be) in 2022 (hopefully).

I have written about living in the moment.  Extracting every drop of juice out of the present.  Living risk-safe and not risk-free.  Becoming a Rona Planner: always having a plan b,c,d – and a fall-back option if none of those are possible.  And the first month of this yearned-for 2021 hasn’t changed my mind one iota.

I always had “my moments”.  Days when Mr Grumpy impersonated the normal sunny  happy me.  And all my life – not just recently.   My Mr Grumpy moments cannot be blamed solely on Rona.   How I feel and behave has been a buffeting of living and my personal choice buffet all my life.  It is how I respond to the expected and unexpected – it is a lifelong daily choice – a minute-by-minute-every-day choice. 

So I cannot blame Rona for that either.

My choice is to carry-on doing what I know best.  Bending the hell out of the rules with love.  Love for you, love for me and love for each other.  Love that causes me to keep you risk-safe – the same love keeping me risk-safe in my choices, and which means love keeps each of us as risk-safe as we each allow.

It is why today I am baking bread to go with the soup that Mrs Paul is making today.  It is why both of us have created as much “normal” in our lives as possible every day.  It is why January seems to have flown by.  It is why I wait eagerly for a letter-text-call for my vaccine jab but have no illusion it will change anything.  That even a second jab (assuming it happens as promised) won’t change much in our living.  That even if Mrs Paul gets her jabs (thus far scheduled way after mine). That even if our children (and so much further down the line after us).  Even if all of us have the vaccine in one country but not he next.  I have no idea how much will or won’t change.

All I do know is that I don’t know.

Just as I have never known what the future beyond this moment holds.  So living in the moment is not because I survive – it is how I thrive (more often than not).  Just not in our bank account or my career titles or anything that is worldly-value-power-prestige worthy.

Thriving in my head, heart and soul.  In the “places” I carry with me each day – that have become the me I am now.  That way of living really works in this moment and the next.  It is where love thrives – in this moment and the next.

And if I can do it then anyone can.

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It’s pissing down with rain and more rain here!  Which should mean no water shortages for a month or three.  And also means a snug-as-a-bug-day indoors as well!  I always got a buzz out of those days – have had my whole life – the sound of rain out there and me all snug in here.  I have that buzz as I write these words.

Isn’t life fabulous when I take the time to live each moment?
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