9 July 2020
Social Distancing in Cumbria
Week 16
by Vic Leader
This is going to be the last week of my log. The virus has not gone, the pandemic is not over but I think I’ve said all I have to say about the issues it raised in relation to us humans. Although not for many folk, it was the simplicity of life in Lockdown that enabled me to reflect on some of our curiosities, some of the wonderful and less wonderful aspects that make us what we are. Also some of the ways in which it seems to me we might have better lives when the pandemic has passed.
And there are many more things I could say, but life is returning to its complex ways. Perhaps it is inevitable that the only thought that seems worth saying this week is that we have created an environment that is now too complex for many people. Too much choice, too much regulation, too many gadgets, too many simple benefits that have been over-complicated, too much debt. Too many distractions from what some of us have discovered to be the important things in life.
There will be great pressure on us all to go out and spend. To crank up the machine that has given so much to our western way of life and taken so much away. I’ve written about it over the previous 15 weeks of this log. Now it is time to decide, each of us for ourselves, whether we are returning to the old order or taking a new turn. Change is always scary so I think I know how it will go.
For me I need to get back to that aspect of my life that got me through many of its difficult times, my guitar. I have neglected it, relatively, during this period. Not abandoned but neither advanced. It was my focus that shifted. It was right to concern myself with this new unseen threat and, in that mode my guitar was still my stress buster. But I promised myself that my retirement would take me further along the musical path that my guitar presented to me. So that path beckons.
I hope that you, dear reader, have your own ‘guitar’, whatever shape and form or nature it may take. Thank you for reading. I hope you have got a little out of doing so, I have enjoyed writing it and it gave me a focus in this uncertain time.
I feel I’ve come to terms with the long-term presence of CV, 19 and whatever versions may follow. I understand that it is here to stay and brings back the type of danger that we thought had been eliminated some while ago. I can’t know if I will fall foul of it, although I can be careful, take precautions. But then there are many more other perils in this life and the only thing we know for sure is that life is ultimately fatal.
You may think that this is a fatalistic end to the log but I prefer to see it as realistic. And that’s how it is: your perspective is different from mine, not on everything I’m sure. And now there are approaching eight billion (8,000,000,000) of us that means lots of differences. But I happen to think there also some basics that tie us together.
So keep thinking, keep safe, but most of all keep living.
