It is mid-October 2020. On my birthday last Tuesday, another partial, and in my view a call for an “intelligent”, lockdown was announced. At times this evokes a nauseous feeling in me, which sometimes leads to deep dark thoughts. The next flurry that comes to mind is that my moods could be better. I look for joy again, mainly with music.
I notice from the reactions on Social Media and from some individual contacts that I am better off to take a different route, a route that is more modest for myself. Just to be able to look at myself smiling in the mirror, because the tendency to isolate myself doesn’t make things any better.
“No man is an island!”, As John Donne once stated.
The way to go to a route that I have yet to chart is that I pull myself out anyway, without too many whips and jokes. And although I used to experience so much difficulty with slogans in the past such as: “It is, as it is!” Without too many different opinions and opinions, I find that this sentence finally does help me.
Never before, after all, have I cared so little about other people’s opinions and intellectual excesses. I notice that I can do without that opinion of someone else. I notice that I keep myself going by letting everything slide off me every now and then and that it is more important to give my ego and brain some rest now and then.
If we all wanted to get through this process in a little bit unharmed, we could all show some sobriety and cheerfulness. And I feel that if someone else cannot or does not want to take that route, then I’d better choose for myself.
After I figured that out for myself, I read a very personal story on Twitter about someone who just like that, because of health reasons, is assigned a different, hard and unfair route. And that means that I can see my own trajectory in a somewhat different light. What it’s called: it suddenly makes our joint route very relative and less important…
