The morning after the news, I drove my child to school as usual. I drove an elderly friend to an appointment. Picked up a desk chair for a partner. Picked up Hallowe’en candy garbage while I walked the dog through the woods. I bought food. I ate. I worked. I moved. I breathed.
In the wee hours of one recent morning I penned something in my journal that helped me understand why I haven’t been writing much lately. I listed a bunch of things that had happened the day before, sentences of non sequiturs all starting with ‘And’, about nine of them one after another (out of chronological order to boot), and then suddenly: ‘And I wonder if there is anything left worth writing, or at any rate worth sharing. I feel like I am just relearning what people have already learned throughout time.’
Relearning.
A child of twelve said to me yesterday, ‘We’re doomed.’ I hadn’t told them; they had learned the news at school. ‘I mean us, too; Canada. We’re doomed.’
‘Yes.’ I didn’t know what to say. What can one say at such times?
‘But at least we have the Royal Canadian Air Force to protect us.’ I stared at them blankly. ‘The geese,’ they said.
And then I laughed.
Don’t think I don’t understand how serious this is. And I think the 12-year-old understood it too, in their way. Someone I wouldn’t even want to have working at my local corner gas station is again in charge of a powerful nation, which seems addicted to violence, which happens to be our only border-neighbour. But how I try to deal with all things, disaster included, is with love and with humour. Only a few days ago I wrote, ‘I think if all I have is humour, love, and the wherewithal to create some kind of beauty or other, I’ll be happy.’ Happy is perhaps too strong a word for some circumstances, but nevertheless.
I saw a lot of things on social media yesterday, but the ones that have stuck with me the most have been the ‘chop wood, carry water’ posts. Before. After. The actions are the same.
Relearning.
I’m reading The Brothers Karamazov, and the other day I read this quote out to a friend and asked what he thought of it: ‘Still, it would be strange to demand clarity from people at a time like ours.’
He laughed. ‘Everyone thinks they live in special, unprecedented times,’ was basically his answer.
Relearning.