Reflecting on the past seven weeks, I’ve managed to stay relatively calm this lockdown. On Monday I did a wake up yoga session at which I set out an intention to stay calm over half term. Basically because, like tempting fate, I knew a meltdown was on the cards. Or perhaps I just knew I needed one. We all fall off the best laid intentions sometimes.
Today I feel a million times less psychotic, partly because the way I felt was so unviable I had to climb back up the spout but also because I got up early and headed out for a sunrise walk that lasted for longer than 20 minutes. Always a tonic and more so for the company of a lovely fellow plant-loving friend.
The forecast said rain but actually the sun rose like molten white gold over a bank of lavender clouds, which somehow evaporated into thin air to leave a wash of much-needed blue sky. Walking across The Flats to Alexander Pond, a new sequence of puddles caught the morning light and shone like mirrors in the lush grass.
A time to reflect. A moment to recalibrate. Absorb the sun and convert it into hope. Get the boys out in the afternoon and will it down into their minds and hearts and every weary bone in their fed up bodies. I really feel for them this week, a time when we would usually be on a train to Yorkshire (miss the feeling of departure and arrival), off to stay at Nanna and Dadda’s with their cousins, stepping onto soft carpet, eating my dad’s biryani, losing footballs in mum’s borders and sleeping in childhood beds after drinking too much wine.
As evening falls by the time I write this, the setting sun is now reflected in a stretch of south-facing windows to the West. It backlights a suite of docile clouds that hopefully predict some better weather tomorrow as well; the boost we all need to keep going forward. ‘Difficult to see. Always in motion is the future’ said Yoda.