Everyday

Everyone has a Covid story.

Their angle, their encounter, disbelief or awareness of its impact on another person. Everyone is clocking up a scarring experience. Its ripples are nearby.

Cancellations. Change and contagion.

And I have another this week. I was cautious, not paranoid. I was responsible, having been jabbed twice, and here again, I’m sweating excessively and experiencing the ugliness of Covid-19 for a second time.

The virus continues to move freely. It goes where it wills.

Historians say the result will be a collective memory more personal than perhaps any other moment in history.

Everyone is touched by this. Everyone has a story.

Don’t sweat the small stuff, runs the advice—and it’s all small stuff. Except the small stuff—so small it’s invisible—is the big stuff. See? The days, our hopes and our best-laid plans have to change. We’re getting in a right old tizz, so let’s calm down and itemise our concerns about the virus, which are also symptoms occasioned by it. At the moment, the main concern is an inconvenience. But inconvenience is only inconvenient when it happens to other people; it feels threatening when it happens to you. An unwanted infringement. We collectively grew in the unexpected privilege of helping many others on their doorsteps, and yet now I’m needing to receive. Having distance drops awkwardly happen. It's quite another story.

We all have a story. So let's listen all the more closely. The words between the words have resonance. The pauses. The subtle inflexions, avoidance and clues. It’s a hollow and harrowing time. In unexpected, difficult and unwanted ways.

It's an ordeal in the ordinary. Platitudes and recipes, lifehacks and everyone's opinion aren’t needed. Simple kindness communicates so much. Silent empathy is beautiful.

Potent with so much. Present, active and enquiring.

Maybe that’s what we want every day, not just on pandemic days.

#WritingWithBrevity