December 22, 2021
Here we are again! It’s almost
Christmas of 2021, and it really doesn’t seem like a year since it was
Christmas of 2020.
And as another wave of the virus
surges, so does what they’re calling “virus fatigue”. I don’t think there are
many people who don’t feel this modern-day miasma. I’ve been reflecting lately,
and I really can’t tell you how many times in the 2010s I heard the warnings.
Several learned, intelligent people, people of consequence, warned us that we were
overdue for a major pandemic. They told us that it could be very, very bad.
They told us to be ready.
Then, just as we were exiting
that decade and entering the 2020’s, it came! The pandemic the ubiquitous “they”
had been warning us about for years. And…we really weren’t prepared for this at
all, were we?
Do you think that our habit of
living life at ninety miles an hour, of arranging our society so that instant gratification
is the norm has contributed to our lack of preparedness?
I do.
If you’re a parent, you
inevitably recall times when your children “just couldn’t wait” for something—be
it Christmas morning or arriving at your destination after an hours-long car
ride. It’s that kind of impatience that I believe is gripping society at large
right now. There are a lot of people interviewed briefly on the evening news
casts who are positively whiny about wanting this over.
Which brings me to what else
we are lacking in, and this is a biggie and an absolute necessity for surviving
a pandemic, sanity intact.
From what I am seeing most
people do not, by and large, seem to have an old-fashioned quality called “stick-to-it-ivness”.
I first heard that whining of “when
will it be over?” sometime in May of 2020. This was after the general consensus
was in March, that, hey, we shut everything down, and in a month, it will be
over. Really, people? A pandemic that
comes and goes in a month, three at most?
When we learned there was a
pandemic, David and I were absolutely terrified at first. We didn’t know if it
was an airborne virus that could come on a wind, or if it needed some form of closer
contact to spread. And, since the consensus was that older people, and people
with “comorbidities” were most at risk, and we realized we checked both of
those boxes, yeah, terror defines our original reaction well.
So we shut the door of our
house to everyone who wasn’t one of the three of us, and we watched and we listened,
and most importantly, we learned. Now, in our search for real, solid
information we did stumble upon some “misinformation”, but for us, that was a pretty
easy commodity to sort out. Like separating the wheat from the chaff.
We came to the conclusion that
this pandemic would be with us for two, possibly three years. That realization didn’t
make us at all happy, but it was what it was—and still is. Now, here I must say
that in truth this pandemic could have been much worse. It could have been more
“air borne” than it is, and—and this is a very big and—the scientists
could still be searching for a vaccine. So, if we had to have a pandemic, SARS-CoV-2
is not the worst one that can imagine.
What we never once had on our
bingo cards was that a whole bunch of people would refuse to be vaccinated. Or
wear masks. Or social distance. We never once, in the beginning, could have
imagined that people, en masse, would refuse to believe that the damn virus was
even real.
Because of our failure of
imagination, we are both beginning to wonder how long beyond our original
estimate of two years this thing will last.
We have received two shots of
the Moderna vaccine, and tomorrow, we get our boosters. If, in another 4 to 6
months, they suggest we get another shot, which is what they are doing in
Israel right now? Well, we will be rolling up our sleeves.
We are no longer living in
fear. We watched and we learned. And because we did, we are living in reality. Yes,
we’re tired of it all. But that is something we just have to get over. Or
endure. It is exhausting. But we’re not quitters, generally speaking. And since
we want to stay on this earth for as long as God will allow us to do so, well,
we’ll just do our best to carry on. We intend to live our lives, not by going
ahead and, against best practices, “doing” this or that, and not by clinging to
customs that used to be, as pleasant as they were.
We may not go out to dinner,
or to parties. But we are keeping our attitudes as positive as possible. We are
keeping in touch with family and friends. We are keeping busy.
This year, at some point we
will attend small gatherings of family, and everyone there will be people who
are also vaccinated. Until those two events happen, and, I hope, for every day
from this moment forward, we are keeping the peace of that first gift of Christmas
within our hearts.
And I can promise you that on
Saturday, we will be communicating with our loved ones, and possibly watching
some of our favorite Christmas movies. We’ll remember the joys of Christmases
past—which, as parents of a child who is in heaven is something we have done
for nearly two decades.
May your hearts be filled with
love and laughter and the peace which is at the heart of this season. Merry Christmas,
from our house to yours!
Love,
Morgan
http://www.bookstrand.com/morgan-ashbury
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