August 26, 2020 

I’m a person who really, really loves routine. And when those days happen, as they inevitably do, when that routine is altered—regardless of the reason—well, friends, let me just say, it’s not pretty around here. No, it’s not pretty at all.

It doesn’t even matter if the reason why the routine is all messed up is because I slept in. Not that many years ago, say, three or four, I could go to bed at 1 am and wake up at 7 am, no problem. I go through sleep stages, not nightly ones but stages that seem to last for months. I went through a long stretch, not long after my heart surgery, when I had to have 8 hours of sleep a night, every night. I. Had. To. Have. It.

Then, that kind of tapered off and I was getting 5 or 6 hours a night, and that was fine. I’d wake up with the birds, and I had energy and could actually do some things. Real things. Substantive things. Life, as they say, was good. For a while.

And now? My friends, if I stay up as late as 1 am now, I pay a heavy, heavy price the next day. I sleep later, and I have to spend half the day looking for my energy. It seems like only yesterday that I could make myself a to-do list first thing in the morning, and by the end of the day, sit back with pride at a hand full of jobs well done. For right now, at least, those days are gone.

I know what happened, and it really does have a lot to do with the situation that we’re all living in. That situation is, of course, that we are in a global pandemic. And because it changes the way we do things, it creates a kind of “extra emotional weight” on each of us, each and every day. It’s akin to my “miss one part of your routine in the morning and the whole day is screwed” philosophy of life. Also, and not to be discounted, is the lack of going out. I didn’t go out much before the pandemic, but I did venture forth into the wider world. And I did so without stress or worry.

Now, I may go out once a week to get groceries, or sometimes it’s once every two weeks. But I am tense and stressed the entire time I am in the vicinity of other people. I wear my mask and socially distance—and I stress.

As well, I find myself in a routine at the moment that isn’t really working for me. The plan is to begin writing at 9 am and to keep at it until at least noon. Often, I can get a couple of thousand words done in that time. But my husband has a morning routine wherein he walks the two pups—first Missy and then Bear. And as each one leaves, the other begins to wail and/or yip and/or howl. And can you guess what happens to my ability to write at that point?

Life is a careful mixture of balance and compromise and at the moment, I’m in the part of balancing where I have to give in, graciously. David can’t manage both pups at the same time, and he has to walk them in the morning before the heat of the day sets in. He has COPD and his needs, health-wise, eclipse my needs, career-wise. But that’s not the worst of it. The worst of it is that my stamina when it comes to physical activity has, for whatever reason, decreased substantially in the last eight months.

There are days when I’m torn between saying to myself that I’m sixty-six years old—and actually adding an “only” in there. And I can’t help but wonder if this lack of stamina isn’t something that I’ve done to myself.

I recall when our daughter and her son moved back in here more than ten years ago when her marriage ended. She was attending college to get her PSW certificate, and for fifteen months, this household became a family of five. At the time, I had the amount of stamina I have now, but there were things that needed to be done, and so I began to push myself. Not a lot, just a little, every day. Of course, my arthritis wasn’t as bad then as it is now, but otherwise this time feels very much like that time. In the end, by the time they moved out, I could motor through the day fairly well.

I do understand that I will not be able to duplicate that. I am sixty-six years old. However, it seems to me I have a couple of choices. I can ignore how I feel, call it normal, and carry on. Or I can wait for the pandemic to be over and for life to return to normal.

Or I can do one more thing.

I can go back to pushing myself, just a little, every day because this pandemic isn’t going anywhere, not for a good year or more. Life is normal right now, at least until the next time things change.

So really, the best thing I can do is to shut up and get moving.

 

Love,

Morgan

http://www.morganashbury.com

http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury