Daily Discipline

It seems it was another lifetime when I wrote here regularly, when the blog was the primary place for organizing my thoughts and feelings and finding the words to give them life.

I posted photos, and the occasional comment was generally encouraging and helpful. Connections were made.

So much has changed, hasn’t it? It’s easy to say that we just all shifted to social media; but even there, it’s different. My thought process seems altered; I struggle to explain or articulate or even say when or where, much less how; COVID plunged me into some sort of free fall when it come to time. I can’t easily find the relativity, the sticking point, the dot on the page from which to move forward. I have to trace it back to October, 2019, when my granddaughter was born and, a week later, my husband’s father died. I quit coloring my hair. February of 2020, I holed up on a personal retreat in a hotel in Farmville, Virginia, and came to grips with loss and change, with sticky notes layered all over the walls as a visual representation of what was, what is, and what will be.

I thought I was ready to move forward, and I suppose I was ready; I just didn’t know what awaited.

Late 2022 and my granddaughter is now three, my own father died, other friends died, and COVID ravaged us all in some way; pinches and discomfort and excruciating gut punches.

We’re through it, somewhat, although every day I hear of another positive test. But the layers of acceptance are thicker, the vaccines are working, and we’re limping forward.

Forward is good, but it feels unfamiliar. I guess we’ve been running in place for so long now that motion is not easily attained. We’re rusty.

I’m rusty. I’m different. I feel as if I lost three years, had them ripped right off the pages of the calendar and cast into the wind; and yet, so much has happened in these 36 months, not all of it loss.

I feel like I’m starting all over, learning the basics of moving forward.

So shall it be.

I am challenging myself to a project I did a few times years ago that involved marking a month by writing every day. Usually, it was October; I missed that boat, which seems appropriate. Back then, daily, I paid attention and then chose something to write about, here; whatever came to mind. It was a good, necessary discipline that, I believe, will serve me well in this start-up, turn-the-key, inch-along time of impending motion.

November it is. If you read along, I’m always grateful, and welcome your responses.

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