As I wake up each morning, in the comfort of my own home, with so many uncertainties and worries and unknowns ahead of me. As the early morning sun peeks through my windows, creating these little patches of golden light, highlighting these simple moments of beauty, I remember that, despite all the uncertainty, I have so much to be thankful for each day. I have a safe, warm, comfortable home where my children and I can shelter and snuggle and read books, where we can eat together by candlelight and play games, draw pictures, bake and create. Many do not have this privilege, many do not feel safe in their homes and many do not even have a place to call home.
I can see the challenges in this time of lockdown and I can see the gifts, I can feel the loneliness and I can embrace the need for solitude, I can see the destruction and I can notice the healing that is happening underneath. I can see the news and live in fear, I can lose sleep over worrying about my family in England, and then I can be thankful that. despite the fact I no longer have a job, I now have the time to take an afternoon nap.
I can choose to use this time to restore my inner self, I can feel uncomfortable in my own presence and feel over whelmed by the number of activities that I could be doing to use this time productively. I could take myself from one form of busy; school runs, work, extra curricular activities, social events, to another form of busy; online workouts, lockdown bingos, video calls and all the other distractions that are being suggested for us to relieve our lockdown woes. I don't think that any of these things are bad, I just realise that I could spend my time feeling the need to distract myself, keep busy and not allow myself the much needed opportunity for inner evaluation and processing during this time.
Over the past few years, I have grown to appreciate the value and the power of simplicity, that I don't actually need to fill my life with more stuff and more activities, that consumerism won't meet any of my deeper needs and that joy and peace can actually be found in having less and in doing less.
I am no longer sure whether the requests we speak, as my little family of three passes a crystal around the dining table each evening, are a prayer, wish or a fantasy, whether we are speaking to god, the universe, or a deeper part of ourselves. I am not sure what they truly mean, or whether they are heard, but I know that they are words that hold hope. I know that each morning, as the sun rises and sets that I have reason to be thankful and I hold on to the fact that 'this too shall pass'.
