Christmas & New Year’s Around the Corner...

 

How are this year’s holidays different for you?

Nearing the end of a calendar year, the inevitable lists come out: best movies of 2020, most memorable images of 2020, most memorable people of 2020, and so on.

What is certain is that this year had such momentous events, those who survived them can attest that the year twenty-twenty was different.

I am recalling a certain week at the end of August, where a record heat combined with freak dry lightning caused fifteen hundred wild fires in northern California alone. The air was seriously unhealthy, in addition to the masks we wore for a pandemic that had kept us sheltering in place for over five months. Between the pandemic and the fires, family members lost their homes and jobs.

Then, in just one week (that same end of August) both Facebook, Blogger and my website host— decided they were done with their old formats and forced a conversion to a new one. The latter seems so trivial compare the existential challenges all around. But the confluence of the *all of it* nearly broke this camel’s back. It’s hard to try to build a website and adjust to new screens (when most of life has moved to screens) as you literally can’t take a deep breath.

And just then, I had one of those illuminations: I realized I and most around me were more alive than we’d been. As the mounting challenges pressed, we were awakened. From then on, days felt blessed rather than cursed.

 

I hope the coming holidays are the same for you. When listing the year’s personal highlights, may you see how very blessed the year twenty-twenty has been.

©Silent Night by Shelagh Duffett

(Passed away June 24^th  2020)

The Revival of the Telephone Conversation

The Skype/Zoom form of communication was once a novelty, and then a secondary way of conducting business. COVID-19 made it the primary way.

My kids, generation Z/ Millennial, use text for “not in the mood or place to be seen” exchanges, and faceTime/Skype/Zoom for “let’s hang out” times.  It never seems a consideration to use the phone the way we did, for voice only. To be fair, until Email that’s all we had for instant exchanges.

But having to stare at a screen and having it stare back at you for hours on end during these times of minimized in-person connectivity has brought about a kind of screen fatigue.

Young’uns, as well as us old fogies, are using the phone to call and talk, no screens. I didn’t think I’d see that again.

Other strange rollback is the minimization of using public transportation. That was the hip/environmentally correct way to go only a year ago. Now it’s best to drive the family car and better be in it alone, sans family. One car to a person? The horror. 

And remember the reusable grocery bag? That was the conscientious way to go. Now it isn’t allowed. So if you walked to the store, just let them give you those darned disposables to take your food back home.

But of all these things, it’s the sight of young adults using the phone in voice-only mode, which makes me think I went to sleep and woke up in 1990.

I wonder how to reflect all of these^ in my current WIP.

The Universality of Experience

If nothing else, (and there’s plenty else) a pandemic brings home the universality of experience.

There will be time to reflect and assess whether we under-reacted, overreacted, were prepared or not and coped or not.

Right now all such assessments feel premature and sadly too political. Quarrelsomeness is part of our species. But so is mobilization and co-operation.

Which is what I’m focusing on, as friends all over the globe post Corona Outerwear Fashion:

A friend in South Korea^ (They were ahead!)

A sister in Israel^ (She makes these herself)

A friend in Madagascar^

A friend in Maine, USA^

And yours truly in California, USA^

I’m determined to return to musing about writerly and other life things next week. These, too, are universal and there lies the value of shared thoughts.

Can hardly wait to say Bye-Bye to COVID-19. Let’s meet on the other side.

Happy New Year!

The number twenty-twenty is bound to bring a lot of writerly merriment. You know, twenty-twenty vision/hindsight to us all, and all that.

I'll keep it simple, for once. Complexity will return in January. So today---

Happy 2020 everyone!