I got the reminder the other day that this blog was up for renewal, and it has been so long since I have written anything for myself. The past year and a half has been so daunting, and somewhere along they way I lost the enthusiasm for writing. What did I have to say that was worthwhile in a world that seems determined to burn itself to the ground?
Right now, I’m on day four of my fourth Coivd19 lockdown. This time in Auckland, New Zealand. The Delta variant came into the country and hopefully we can get it under control and life will resume as it was, in our country-wide bubble instead of a very small bubble that is my farm cottage.
I seem to be taking a lot of photos of trees, learning how to make marmalade, and weed gardens. I even started knitting again. I am no domestic goddess, but I am finding joy in a small quiet life.
Elsewhere, the world is as fucked up as it has ever been. Afghanistan has just fallen back to the Taliban, elsewhere fires are raging in the northern summer as the IPCC releases its latest report saying we are basically fucked unless we really do something this time. Which we probably won’t.
Culture wars over masks and vaccinations for Covid continue, social media and the internet seems to have turned our brains to mush, and I am utterly baffled by why people seem to have become so hateful and sociopathic. Have we always been this way or is something in society fuelling it? Some days, I just wonder why so many people are plain hateful and mean.
The past 18 months has given us a lot of time to reflect. And it is so easy to feel overwhelmed – to ask does anything I do in this world even matter?
It probably doesn’t, but I do want to write again. Someone once advised me that the best way is to start out small, and I don’t have to write anything deeply meaningful or world-changing. In fact, I’d like to write memories of times and places I’ve lived through as I feel our world is becoming profoundly changed.
I mean, it always does. The world I grew up in no longer exists. It’s funny how at 57 I often find myself explaining the way things were to younger people and realising with a shock that they have no concept of that era. I’m one of the last generations that grew up in a fully analog world. Hell, we thought digital watches were like super-computers.
But I always felt like I was living in an improving world, whereas now feels it like a plunge downwards into a fiery abyss. I don’t know, perhaps at the very least, I’m leaving a record of how things were.
I don’t know if many people will read this or find it interesting, but if you like small stories based on memories and a record of the current time, welcome to my tiny small collection of pixels on the internet.
Moments In Time 