What is a tool if its not out of the toolbox working...

 

On a bitterly cold morning, I sit here, finding myself having to work unexpectedly on my day off… I feel drained and miserable, but part of me is silently reproaching myself for whining because I should be thankful to have a job to do when facing an economic crisis.

 

Either way, I am especially miserable today but working none the same.

 

Since the pandemic, everything has blended into a blur...day and night, weeks, months...time and work mean something different... it's a different flavour of living grabbing onto a sharper and jagged edge for survival. 

 

Today I feel the burn and inflammation from those cuts of survival all over my mind and body as I wonder how long I must hold my breath to consider myself still living.

 

There is a burial today but not attending because of work. We lost an in-law relative to short-term illness... he turned for the worse really quickly and many are stunned by how things degenerated so fast. But nothing about life and death surprises me anymore….I lost count of the deaths in my own family in this pandemic alone…I finally gave up on grief when I lost a cousin in a week, and as plans were underway to lay her to rest, her sister collapsed too. When we buried the sisters, my heart numbed out.

 

I have also since left WhatsApp and removed myself from groups where there is a new crisis announcement every day, sometimes more than once a day. Having buried half my family before the covid crisis, I feel tender about attending burials especially…. I send some contribution when I can, a message of condolence, and hideaway too scarred to lay one more family member on the ground.

 

I have lost friends comrades …it hurts me to think about this. My doctor friend succumbed to the virus, we had argued on chat in December before the pandemic, and I went quiet on him. I wonder if he knows that I loved his gift of friendship, nonetheless. I lost two physicians who attended to me in the past …now, I have stopped looking at the death announcements because too many names and faces are familiar. One friend, comrade, and fellow creative took her own life…it took time to find her body, she often goes recluse, and it is not unusual to not hear from her for months on end…to imagine her last moments and the loneliness she endured has been heart-wrenching for me. I was unable to attend the wake or burial or talk about her until this little sharing. I have stopped talking about the people I have lost to let fresh memory to go fallow until they are less raw and painful.

 

I sit here and watch the protective fluffy clouds slowly part ways to let in the sun in to warm the earth, our bodies, and our souls…I realise everything has a season. In a future season and moment, I wish for the day I look back at this moment and remember the value of pausing…. pausing in the middle of messy, painful noise and urgent deadlines…pausing to say that with every experience of life, good, bad or ugly there is a lesson to learn, a wisdom to be drawn…a way to evolve…a moment to regroup and pulling back before responding.

 

And in incase, I do not get to read this to myself in happier and lighter times...I hope someone else reads it…and it resonates with them.

 

When the upheavals are at their peak, we have an opportunity to open our toolbox of resources (knowledge, memory, creativity, laughter, tears, dance, song, music, prayers, rituals, play, etc) and select whatever we need at any one moment. Take and use whatever tools we need to give us the wherewithal to survive today and tomorrow should we live to see it.

 

Until the time we have space to just be…. the tools keep us breathing, help us put one foot in front of the other, conserve and guard our energies…these tools keep flickering fire inside tiny but still smouldering…it gives me hope in a hopeless time when life seems to have lost meaning and worth. 

My tools are life itself and the spaces in between…

 

What is a tool if it isn't out of the toolbox working…? It works for me in the in-betweens of moments and seasons, and who knows, it might work for you as well...