By Marci Fifield – September 2, 2020
Does anyone remember the second Twilight book, New Moon when Edward leaves town and cuts ties with Bella? Instead of describing her day-to-day existence or attempting to make the reader feel what she is feeling (which happens to be nothing) there is simply one page that reads “October.” The page after that reads “November.” It trends on like this until we get to January where Bella continues to have no personality.
As annoying as I find the Twilight series, Stephanie Meyer was onto something. I think if I had tried to write about anything during the past four-months they would have read nothing more than the name of the current month.
I try not to be too hard on myself for this severe case of writers block but when I think about how Henry David Thoreau wrote one of the greatest books of all time while living in solitude without television, I feel like perhaps I'm flattering myself when I say I'm a writer.
Quick side note: I never thought in a million years I would write an article that would include both Twilight and Walden.
Moving on… I'm know I'm not the only one who has felt the surreal nothingness that comes with each day of social distancing. There have been days that I would purposefully sleep as long as possible because it was easier than being awake and feeling the time drag on.
It sounds so depressing when I put it this way, however, I continue to believe that whatever happens is what is meant to happen. This mindset comes either from my own maturity, or the prescription drugs that I take daily under medical advisement. Regardless of my acceptance, COVID-19 still weighs me down and I find myself feeling low more often than I feel happy.
The hardest part of living through this pandemic has been watching how it has affected my children. There have been weeks at a time that they became so isolated and under-stimulated that when an opportunity presented itself for them to do something new and fun, they didn't want to do it. Unfortunately, there were many more times that I didn't want to do anything either so their attitude may have been a reflection of my own. Parental failure on my part.
I keep hoping for a turn of events sooner rather than later and I hope that they won't remember how unhappy their mom was during the year 2020. I hope they will instead remember that we got a new kitten to cheer us up while we stayed home so often. I hope they will remember that they got to see their dad a lot more because he was working at home. I hope they remember the drive by birthdays, the parades of police cars and fire trucks for the graduates and the times we got to spend outside chatting with neighbors and strangers from a safe distance.
Our happiness during this pandemic, I'm sure, isn't as obvious for us to recognize it was before the 2020 apocalypse. It has to be searched for with one of those large magnifying glasses that Sherlock Holmes would use and then put on a display shelf with all the other evidence to reminds us that there are solutions to each problem we encounter.
I will leave you all with this final quote from Harry Potter’s Dumbledore - a wise wizard if there ever was one.
"Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light."