Isolation Journals: Be Slow
In the stillness, I think about everything I have left to do. Not just the piles of to do lists tacked onto my walls, both real and virtual, but my ginormous bucket list things. I feel impatient, sitting here, staring at my mundane things in my mundane life in this mundane neighborhood. My eyes wander over to my desktop home screen; it is a picture of a cartoon treehouse (Jake and Finn’s to be specific) and I think about all the things I’ve wanted growing up. The thought of a mundane life drove me crazy, I was always destined for extraordinary. Not because I was owed it, but because I wanted it so bad that it just had to be true; my life was going to be extraordinary and no one was going to stop me from it. There were worlds to save, and monsters to slay, fates to conquer.
And yet, here I am, sitting by a completely ordinary window, looking out to a completely ordinary suburb. These past few months have humbled me. It has been a journey I have been on for a while, but a pandemic will really do the trick reminding one that they are not any better than everyone else stuck at home, at the whims of a virus that no one can fight. Not even a girl who was destined to fight demons bigger than her. The extraordinary can no longer be found in larger than life cities and chaotic nights, it has to be found in the smallest and quietest of things; the smile of a two year old cousin who never fails to make your heart swell up when she laughs; the preteen boys who remind you that life is as fun as you make it, and that there is nothing that compares to Saturday morning cartoons with Oreo cereal; an aunt that paints with you, and remembers that you love to write and so gets you so many notebooks you don’t know what to do with them; an uncle who shows he cares by letting you help him with his cherished business; a mother and brothers ten million miles away who check up on you to make sure you haven’t had a break down yet (you have, multiple times); the sun on your arm, slanting through the window as you sit in a comfortable chair writing down your thoughts. It is all rather ordinary, and yet the fullness I feel when I let myself appreciate all this feels rather extraordinary. I am blessed, and that’s rather nice in the grand scheme of things, isn’t it?
*This is part of a series inspired by Suleika Jaouad’s Isolation Journals prompts
