I’m walking along a long stretch of beach up North. It’s not as strict lockdown as it has been, but life certainly isn’t “normal” still. We’ve been told we’re allowed to travel to see family and so that’s what we’ve done but streets are still sleepier than usual.
As I walk along the beach, I have my headphones loosely in one ear so that I can hear my podcasts and the ocean simultaneously. Walking the beach has been my most consistent activity during lockdown. Every day I head to a beach, take off my shoes, bare faced and bare-footed and walk. I squish the sand in my toes and feel the wind on my face, some days like this one, the wind is a little colder and it feels like its washing my face clean. That raw weather that feels like it wakes you up. Some days I listen to folks I admire talking about things I know nought about, other days I listen to old familiar voices on topics I love. I’ve been laughing a lot out loud. Some days, when I can’t fit any more talking into my head, I put on my current favourite playlist and somewhere down the beach I find myself dancing in my body with no one around for as far as I can see.
I found myself in quarantine in a slightly (*cough* hugely) unforeseen arena of my life: unemployed, two stints working in Europe before July cancelled, a move overseas…again…cancelled, living in a beachside apartment over two hours from the city with a suitcase and in the middle of my first (and hopefully only) global pandemic. For the first few weeks, I found myself, like so many, frantically checking the news. Each morning, each evening, each 2am bed-roll-over. Each cough of a loved one was an alarm bell. I felt fear and sadness and confusion and panic but all very quietly. I trapped them in my body like little knots. It was in the middle of the night that they would come out. And then, as time went by and a strange structure formed to this new period of life, I let go. I let go easier than I think I’ve ever let go in my life. I let go of scratching my head about how I felt to find myself without a job. I let go of all the plans I’d made to be living back abroad by August. I let go of the next job I had wanted lined up that had started falling into place. I even let go of make-up and my hairbrush. In a weird way, I reset. I picked up my yoga mat some mornings and my Negroni most evenings. I picked up the pasta and put down the meal rushing.
And I surfed. And I walked. And I read. And painted. And listened. And cooked.
And as the days turned into weeks, I found myself in a very peculiar position. There were large elements to my life that were now…sunnier than they had been before. I woke up and loved the feeling of running my hands over my face all throughout the day without fear of rubbing make-up everywhere. I enjoyed how long and curly my hair grew. I loved getting up every morning and jumping in the ocean before coffee, no matter how many squeals it took on the days the water was less inviting.
What I really loved was how many ideas I had all of a sudden. How many new artists or authors I was hearing of and having the time to learn more about. How many new poems by old poets I stumbled across. How many times I would be so brimming with a thought, I’d have to whip out my phone mid-walk to jot something down.
I also seemed to let go of expectations that were keeping my shoulders up around my ears. How long had they been there? I mean I knew I didn’t love my job and I knew I was growing impatient with aspects of my day-to-day, but I didn’t realise I was holding my breath so much. My shoulders moved down. I put the expectations down. And I blossomed.
I felt like a version of myself I haven’t had access to for a little while. I read about writing and I wrote about reading. I painted the views I was seeing out the window and the ones I wished I was seeing from around the world. I forgot that there was a public me and a private me. Somehow in the mixture of the world getting shaken upside down, it felt like everyone became a little more vulnerable outwardly.
And so, a few months again down the track, I’m back in the city. I’m not putting my toes in the sand every day and I’ve got an ear infection from too much time in the ocean that seemed to arise as lockdown lifted. And I have all these ideas still, but it feels like I can never seem to find a way to write them down in time anymore. It’s like the expanse of the beach walks meant I had time to see the tail of the idea and grasp onto it but here, the idea moves at a city pace and the tail is gone before I can find a name to call it back to me.
All I can do is wonder how to move forward when you miss a past born of a pandemic? I think about it a lot. Is it selfish? Insensitive? Weird? Totally normal? We aren’t quite back to normal yet, are we? And yet, we aren’t in the midst of the slumber. I know my experience isn’t everyone’s and had we not had a balcony and the ability to get into the ocean each day, it would have been so different. But I was somehow able to appreciate so much more with so much less.
So now I walk in big green parks and cuddle friends’ puppies and sometimes even go to a wine bar for a large glass of red wine. But I don’t think I’ve figured out yet how to bring my new findings into my old flat. I wonder if you know what I mean? I wonder if a few of us now have scrambled our values a little like a boggle board and the words all look different now. I find myself remembering things from my past I’d put aside or left to wither. I find myself thinking a lot of the things I loved as a kid. I’m finding the simplicity harder to hold onto than I thought it would be. I guess, it’s always harder to swim against a tide, right? The world is trying to get back to normal but what if we don’t feel ‘normal’ anymore?
We must just feel our way through it because the only way is forward, as ever. I remember hearing once that ‘a crisis’ originated from a word meaning ‘to sift’- that it forced us to sift and mine our lives to see what was left. I think that’s what some of us have done and in doing so, I found jewels I’d forgotten about or had forgotten to value. I began to recognise a bit of myself that I wanted to keep. Maybe the crisis could be our creation?
I now find seashells in all my jacket pockets. I’d collected them from the beach most mornings – perfectly formed and thumb size. Each time I shove my hand in and feel this odd shape, I feel joy when I pull it out and see this little talisman has found its way into my day. Introducing me to all the version of me I’ve been this year. 2020 – what a f*cking doozy, huh?