This morning I met a friend at a coffee shop, and we sat outside enjoying a conversation over morning coffee. Before the pandemic started this was a regular occurrence, but in the past year we have only tried 2 or 3 times. Both of us are very concerned about our own, and each other’s health and were too scared regarding Covid exposure.
Today’s conversation was centred around checking in on what has happened personally during the past year. My friend commented, and I agreed that we have both enjoyed the increased isolation, and separation from crowds. We like to spend time alone, and are both dreading the return to “normal” where we might be expected to occasionally be surrounded by large groups of people, e.g. in church or in concerts.
But, one thing that I wasn’t expecting to hear was that my friend who is now 75 years old, has spent a lot of time lately reflecting on the poor decisions he has made in his life, and how they have affected his current situation. He stated that walking away from relationships without attempting to fight for his fair share of the home and finances has left him unable to buy a home, or support his family like he would have hoped. He was surprised at how often during this past year he has found himself dwelling on the negative outcomes of his experience, even though he realizes that he does have a good life.
I tried to remind him how other people view him, and how they respect him and think he is such a generous and caring person. We agreed that having more time to ourselves this year has given us perhaps too much time to reflect. Or is it too much time? Should we all spend more time reflecting, and trying to sort through issues that we have never dealt with? Is the purpose of all the busy work in our lives just to keep us from doing any soul-searching, and potentially digging up baggage that we should really confront and resolve?
Every few years I find that I have taken on too much work, whether paid or volunteer. When our province shut down last spring to stop or slow down the spread of Covid-19, I found the extra time to reflect on my life was very unusual. In fact, I looked for small projects just to keep me busy. I caught up on many, many hours of sleep by napping every afternoon. I played through several of my piano books to find pieces that I wanted to perform even though there were no plans for concerts. I watched endless amounts of YouTube videos and webinars, participated in Zoom calls, listened to hours and hours of news broadcasts…
Those were some of the activities that kept me unavailable for dark thoughts to surface. They also kept me from soul-searching and bringing up past hurts that I haven’t resolved. Then, of course, I got busy again with double the number of students, and other live-streaming and recording activities. And now I’m worn out!! I have one more week of a full load of teaching, and I am finally again looking forward to some time off. Maybe, just maybe I might find some time to retreat into myself and work through cleaning some of the dark corners of my life story.
Journalling and keeping this blog have provided a gentle chance to do some reflecting. Nothing serious, but a starting point. Hopefully in the coming months I will continue to dig deeper into past experiences that are still affecting me. Wow….that could get interesting!
Reflections 