This morning my beautiful, wonderful friend Julie Drybrough was walking her dog at 6:30am and she then wrote an exquisite blog musing on what we need to take us through this winter of Covid. She simply called it: “Endurance“. Today I give you an excerpt, then a few thoughts of my own on what we need to endure:
I can’t help thinking that there is a calling right now for those who have done emotional and mental marathons. Those who have done “the Work” and can already function and endure in this type of odd-liminal/ half-life where things are restricted, yet not. Where we are alone, together. Where things shift without due warning. Where there is so much fatigue and fear and fury…
They might be coaches, therapists, psychologists, scientists, people of faith, they might be people who have lived with long-term illness or deep personal pain or addiction and overcome it… it might be the very people who have been seen as being Hippy-tree-hugging-touchy-feely outsiders… but those who can articulate and sit in amongst all this confusion with a modicum of calm, patience, empathy and understanding…these are the very resources and leaders we need right now… because those who have run paths of long-term uncertainty and have sat with grief and loss and confusion… they have something in them.
Resource, wisdom…an antidote to fear and anxiety.
They are out there. They are in your life somewhere.
They may help us endure.
Let us be there together for each other to get through this.
I also feel to share that when I started the practice of daily writing it was almost exactly three years ago, and that part of why I chose this path was, at that time, to help me endure. I had recently got divorced, made my business go dormant for a time, also moved to a new city (London). Many shifts, all of which combined to have me feel profoundly off balance for a time, not knowing what lay ahead. Writing helped me through that liminal phase, to endure, to come out the other side. As the movie critic Mark Kermode would say:
“It will all be alright in the end. If it’s not alright, it’s not the end
And, a closing thought, thinking of my lovely and loving friend, when it comes to the heart of what we need to endure, I give you the wisdom of the Beatles, beautifully interpreted by Lynde David Hall for the movie Love Actually: