Do you remember the days when the New Year brought hope and inspiration? Where have those days gone? It is the day before the kids are getting ready to return to school after Christmas break, and what do I get; an email from the school warning that school closures are likely in our future. Ugh! Can you say de je vu??? We are headed full-throttle into the THIRD year of COVID. And I thought heading into year two was bad… never could I have imagined we would run into a third year feeling just as lost as ever.
So, what do we do? What can we do? I can go on and on about taking time out for yourself, to live a healthy lifestyle, eat better, exercise…but you know all of this… heck, we ALL KNOW ALL OF THIS. So how can we fill our lives back up with hope and inspiration when this year starts with such a bleak beginning?
Start your days being grateful for how far we have come. While it remains a dark tunnel when it comes to COVID, with vaccines and new treatments becoming available in the event you do become infected. The prognosis is far more positive than two years ago when we first encountered this mean little pokey ball!
Soak in the fact we aren’t in total lockdown again. It appears that the consensus is a complete lockdown is not the best way to deal with this thing. So, it doesn’t seem likely we will go back into a total lockdown.
The length of time for isolation has been shortened. We started at 14 days… then went to 10, now we are down to 5 days. This is far more doable than 14! Especially when it comes to our kiddos being home from school. Yes, there is COVID, but we did not lose all the other colds, cases of flu, etc. and our kids get them. One cough, sneeze, or runny nose, and they were sent home for 14 days! For my 7-year-old, that is not the end of the world. But, for my 12-year-old, in 7th grade, two weeks is a long time! She misses a lot of tests and classwork that puts her far behind in her classes. She is already so hard on herself, so when she feels behind, she gets overwhelmed and full of anxiety! It is a lot for them to carry. Five days out is a lot better than 14, so that is a “win.”
We EVENTUALLY will reach herd immunity. If nothing else, we MUST be closer to heard immunity today, 2+ years into this thing, than we were in the beginning. Between vaccines, people getting COVID, and of course, those with the vaccine that STILL got COVID (I am part of that camp!), our bodies are better positioned to fight this when it comes.
We are still learning… perhaps this won’t go away until we finally set down our differences and stand together as one. This one is just my wishful thinking. 2020 was such a scary, intense, and terribly beautiful year. It took a while to stop trying to fight against the calm, but eventually, once I did, my life was swallowed by a sense of calmness that I had not felt in so long. The silence was deafening but clarifying. At the end of 2020, I had so much hope and inspiration going into 2021, and 2021 was a great year. However, it didn’t take much for me to fall back into my busy habits of working long hours and forgetting about the healthy habits I had incorporated into my life in 2020. It is like the pendulum swung way too far one way and then overcorrected way too far the other. PERHAPS, in 2022 we will find the healthy balance of calmness and self-care and steady productivity and success on the other. This will be our year of BALANCE. We can do this! Let’s find the balance and peace that we ALL need, promote harmony and peace in your relationships, focus on coming together, not tearing people apart for not having the same beliefs as you. We can all grow and learn how best to live with COVID together. Once we find a way to stand together, we will move forward.
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by: Jennifer Segura
