The children are watching Paddington, I’m sitting here thinking about putting a wooly on. My ankles ache from our walk yesterday and I’ve got a huge mug of camomile tea to drink. I thought I’d have a think out loud about New Year. I’m interrupted by the bleep of my phone, another of my friends relatives with covid and isolating.
We should have by rights been away but I cancelled it, what with the rising covid rates and my friend isolating. The news is full of gloom, sexual violence and corruption, family embarrassment at siblings and adult children, children killed on the streets. Governments not listening to legitimate concerns or what needs to happen going forward.
A friend shares a recipe for bolstering immunity.
I’m trying to think about New Year resolutions, mindful of just how much is out of my hands. Not knowing what the future holds.
It’s funny how things change. On our family zoom there was mention of critical race theory! I wouldn’t have expected that without perhaps me mentioning it first. It made me smile but listened to how it fed into fears of loosing out and scarcity.
They talked about how there are people here alive who hid under the table if a black or brown person came to the door, such was the fear. They talked about how people wouldn’t sit next to someone on the bus just in case they “weren’t one of us”. Such was the suspicion of Catholics back in the day. How that isn’t even a thing anymore now that classrooms are made up of people from every background rather than just the two or three families of the past. How it was related to the unknown.
They talked about the regional nature of prejudice, how it was general rather than specific to the individual. We talked about the harms of empire, the violence. Wondered how we turn that into a thing of the past. People still in denial. I look up massacre and find something about Glen Coe in 1692 and decide I’m too tired and wonder what I’m doing.
My sibling told me how he doesn’t buy from China. It makes me reflect on our mistakes of the past, our withdrawals that lead people to starve and how that might be different. I talk about the black business models where it’s an ecology, each part supporting the next, holding each other up. They talk of a common task only seen as one of collaboration, how only the teachers could extract the individualism to meet their requirements.
We reflect on those in finance how the career migration to putting spiritual concerns first only seems to happen one way and we ponder on why that might be.
My arms ache as I type and I wonder what I’m getting at. Writing it into being, that ecology of support. I read something somewhere about how nature doesn’t let us down and I’m mindful of the ministry of naps, how they remind us to slow it down. But some of us can’t wait.
I wonder at my writing. What it’s for. Why? To what end and I’m not sure. Just to take up space when I haven’t before? Striving for a world based less on extraction, each having their fair share.
I read a news article about the lack of Nurses try to find it but find instead the ecology already existing the walking groups, tai chi, yoga, dancing and cycling wonder about those who can no longer participate, acknowledge the ableism and whiteness in these. A pop up from an ex-colleague, an invitation from someone long retired. What next?