Silver Linings

Winners is shut down.  Chapters is shut down.  You can only do drive through at Starbucks.  Church is cancelled as well as our home group.  The office is closed.  Pottery Barn is closed.  H & M is closed.  The Bay is closed.  Nordstrom’s is closed (not that that effects me in any way).  Zara is closed as well as IKEA.  Can’t go to the gym – closed. Can’t travel – not that I’d want to at this point.  Can’t go to the movie theatres.  SO I guess I may as well stay home.  There is no where to go.  This is the ultimate case of “all dressed up with nowhere to go”.  A few fast food places open – well if their food doesn’t kill you, the germs you pick up from the younguns who think they are invincible,  will.
So I am finally confined to my house.  I have often said that if I were stuck in my basement for a year,  I would never run out of things to do…and that is still the truth.  Why is it that once you are told to not go out,  all you can think about is going out?  Now you don’t want to stay home.  I am not sure why because, I, of all people have a wonderful home to be isolated to.  We have food and essentials.  Our home is clean and well decorated. Pleasant.  Comfortable. Warm. Safe. It is definitely a Home, Sweet, Home. We are surrounded by our favorite things.  One of them being our adult children that are living at home for such a time as this.  We get along and love each other.  They are so interesting.  I have so many unread books and a sewing machine and serger that hardly get used when I am busy gallivanting around town.   I have canvases and paint.  I could paint up a gallery.  I have a freshly tuned piano that wants to be played with.   I have journals to fill and a blog to update.  I have a cookbook to write and recipes to be tested.  We have Instagram, Facebook and email.  We have Netflix.  We could watch Christmas movies.  Whose going to stop us??  I mean we already turned our Christmas lights back on to join others across North America in a message of hope.  We have games.    We have been so blessed and now we get a chance to slow down and appreciate and enjoy those blessings that we have been tripping over all these months and years.  Always reaching for that new thing to distract us and to obsess about.
Now we get the opportunity to slow down.  To contemplate.  To exercise gratitude.  To learn.  To relax.  To get to know one another better.  To find peace.  To adopt some new habits.  Some better habits.  To realize what we do and do not need to survive.  To simplify.  To stop the acquiring of things and spending money on stuff.  Time to pray.  Time to meditate.  Time to be kind and generous. A time to re-assess our lives and our purpose and our focus.  I think a lot of us really needed this time.  I know the financial implications are scary but maybe even that is a concept we need to rethink.
There is always a silver lining.  Look for the good in every difficult situation.  It’s there.  And the nature of a mass pandemic as a contagion is that you have to be thinking about the other person.  Its not all about you.  Its not all about me.  Its about doing the right thing.  The compassionate thing.  The selfless thing.  The kind thing.  The inconvenient thing.  And who doesn’t need to hone up those character traits?
Well, I’ve got to go now and drop a bag of flour on my 88 year old mother’s doorstep and then we are having a Netflix party with some of our family that live miles away.  Why didn’t we think of this before now???  Necessity is the mother of invention.