Playing for Time

Day 365 – 03/16/2021

One full year, with a diary page every day & a half to show for it… I’m calling that creativity. These 233 pages hold joy and tears, light spirits and heavy hearts, my truth, reality as it happened, shock and awe. Kim and I created our own environment in here when we sheltered, and fine-tuned our routine to meet the circumstances. We’ve creatively avoided driving each other screaming yellow bananas in this open loft, and managed to create an even better vibe than before. Creativity matters in a crunch, as does patience.

This year in the catacombs could have been so much easier on everyone, and infinitely less deadly, but it was what it was, we went through some things, and eventually it’ll all just magically fade away. The mantra from hell still haunts…

All year I’ve railed against injustice on these pages, grieved cruelty and loss, damned stupidity, sought answers to the human dilemma, wished for connection… but a speed-skim from March 16, 2020 to today tells me it’s been at least 85% sunshine all up in here, and I’m glad I can look back and know that.

After the steady outpour, it could be time for a sabbatical, so I’ll be consulting with the muses… when they fall silent, I follow suit. Writing it all down was a wise plan… likely the best care I could have provided to myself and anyone who’s had to deal with me.

But tomorrow restarts the clock for 2021 & a half, as all of us survey the wreckage and wonder where to start. The challenges will gradually become less life-or-death, and more life-or-less. But it’s hard to settle for less, knowing what we know, and being alive all the way seems like the only choice. Thinking about sunshine… thinking about all the good hearts who got us this far.

So, Diary, I’ll take you underground again and close the book on the past twelve months. It was a microcosm of everything good or bad about the human experience, and it’s a valuable bit of living added to my arsenal of understanding. I learned things I wouldn’t have comprehended any other way… and it was past time.

My personal regrets in life are almost solely over stupid things I’ve said, leaving people with wrong impressions. But regretting circumstances isn’t in me because if you change one thing you’ve changed everything. So we live what’s in front of us and hope we do it right… and I have no regrets over the year we just survived. We kept up with the science, we followed the protocols, we’re fully vaccinated, and everything from here on out is gravy. Hmmm… wouldn’t it be nice.