A year ago I wrote a post about Befriending Slowness. When I wrote it, I did not know that the whole world was only a month away from slamming on the brakes. I knew that 2020 was going to be transformative for my family because I knew that we were going to end the daily comic around which all our lives had been shaped for twenty years. The eight months preceding my post on slowness were ones of frantic home disaster recovery and wedding planning. It was already a sharp contrast. Then the pandemic slowed everyone down. Then the end of the comic changed the core premises of our household.
I remember a moment last spring, I think it was in April or May, when I was sitting outside in my hammock and feeling as if the constraints imposed by the pandemic were like a cocoon, and important constriction which made transformation possible. Part of me wanted the constraints to stay in place long enough to teach me how to move through the world differently. At the same time I was mourning the opportunities snatched away from my young adults. They had just begun to climb out of their pits of depression when pandemic snatched away their ladders and slapped a lid on top of us all. It was the work of months to shift that pit trap into a greenhouse where we could all grow in new ways.
In December I had no interest in doing year-in-review activities. I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that they’re starting to tug at me now as we approach the anniversary of when pandemic changed everything. The onset of the pandemic has a much bigger footprint on my life in the past year than the shift from one calendar year to the next. Which brings me back to where I started this post. My life no longer feels slow. My kids no longer feel trapped in pits of depression. We move through our lives at a slower, more deliberate pace, than the frantic energy we felt before, but we are moving. It feels good to be moving forward.