17.08.21 – Health, perspective, being perceptive, guilt

Sometimes it’s hard to know the true measurable impact of what a ‘pandemic’ means and how it can really impact you.

It’s such a broad all-encompassing term and because it’s so broad, it makes it easy to detach yourself from its meaning and to, kind of, not really have any connection to it all – mainly just as an outside-in observer.

But seeing the word every day, reading it, hearing it, speaking it – and yet still sometimes it’s hard to associate it as a real tangible thing, something that affects you.

And then over time you realise that the small things can build up, when you thought about how the pandemic was affecting you, at one point you might not notice at all, and now on the other side of the tunnel you can look at how much has changed – and how many individual moments you’ve had to react to.

The threat of poor health, the risk of long-term fatigue, fatality, and a vaccine narrative underpinning most of your daily life and conversation isn’t normal, it’s scary, yet somehow, we’re forced to normalise it and we do normalise it. And in a way that’s traumatic. Mentally and physically.

It takes away a lot from you over time as you get used to responding and risk assessing of what would normally be a normal situation.

But it also gives you a stark reminder of your place in the world, how much your body does for you on a daily basis, eat sleep breathe, just to stay healthy, the incredible natural science of it all – and simultaneously the sheer luck that you also have free access to healthcare and medical consultation.

If you saw the world in a rose-tinted glass before, maybe now you just had to adapt to a better sense of realism, maybe its an ageing process, but it’s definitely a by-product from an unprecedented and unexpected situation.

Sometimes you can be left with a feeling of what can only be described as guilt. How you once reacted and responded to a situation may have changed, maybe now you have more freedom again, maybe things have changed – but yet you’re still aware of what you could’ve went through, what you did face at one point – and the fact that some people might still be in a crisis situation. The worlds an unpredictable place and it can change in an instant.

Is it okay for you to move forward. What are other people facing. What kind of fragmented situations are left.

It’s hard to continue ahead, free from guilt – but it’s also important to recognise those feelings and separately be able to respect that your mind, decisions, and circumstances can change.

Living in truth, in the present, is all you can do when uncertainty is always a factor.