Happy Easter!
My cousin sent me this article which is a great read if you have a few minutes. My question for him was “Do you have any plans for doing things differently/changing things when it starts going back to “normal”?”
I have that question for myself as well. And I don’t have an answer right now except that I want to do better?
But I wanted to do better before all of this happened. I wanted to have adventures and to quote Thoreau because he said it best “I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
This weekend I was supposed to be in Nashville with my mom. But I did not get to go to Nashville. I also did not get to see my family for Easter. I also did not get to have any adventures.
But I can hope that maybe I lived a little deliberately. I touched up the painting in the bedroom my husband has been renovating. I raked the lawn. I colored brown eggs that I ordered from a local farm. I made sugar cookies. I called my mom, twice. I talked to my cousins on Zoom. I watched the new Charlie’s Angels movie with my college friends via Facebook messenger video chat. I wrote letters.
There’s something frustrating in all of this ordinary that makes me restless and anxious. But perhaps it’s in the ordinary that we can find the space to do better. Maybe our more frequent check-ins with the people we care about don’t have to stop when the world goes back to “normal.” Maybe we can all order more eggs from local farms instead of going to the grocery store. Maybe coloring eggs and raking the lawn is sometimes enough.
I hope you had a wonderful Easter 2020 even if you weren’t able to spend it in Nashville, or with your loved ones, or eating ham, or watching your nieces hunt for eggs.
My plan for doing better in a post-Covid world (if we’re lucky enough to have such a thing):
- Become a vegetarian. This is something I’ve wanted to do for a while for my own health, for the environment, and for the animals that will no longer have to die and now I don’t have any more excuses not to do it.
- Shop local. Small businesses are going to be struggling because of this. I want to try and do my part to help.
- Make more time for people. You never know how long you’ll have with someone you care about.