This just about sums it up, and we are not even halfway through the year.
Here is our pool then and now.
It is in need of a new liner, which is why we didn’t bother to open it, against my instincts, so now here it sits – an ideal habitat for mosquitoes, flies, ducks, and the occasional opossum (that post is coming…) Contrasted and compared to last year’s pool scene, this is a stark reminder of the bullshit that is 2020 in a nutshell. There is a lesson in learning to wait.
Oh well. Such first-world problems aren’t the end of our world, first or otherwise. Annoying? Yes, especially when it’s been sunny and in the 80’s and there is literally nothing else to do, but my mind opens up at such times, and the imagination unfurls like it has since I was a child, and suddenly a backyard even without a pool is a magical oasis. Hell, our living room alone is a place of endless enchantments, with its books and photo albums and music and memories and artistic objects and gifts from around the world. Going through all the stories connected to everything there could take an entire month, and all of it filled with happiness and contentment.
Now is not the time to opine our current circumstances nor compare it to past glories. So much of our discontentment is based on unreasonable comparisons rather than simply examining the moment at hand and how we feel in it. Where is the beauty here and now? Where might we find beauty in the next hour or so? The rest doesn’t matter.
For instance, around the pool at the moment is a grand Korean lilac bush in full, fragrant bloom. The ever-increasing stand of Ostrich ferns is at its most perfect stage, when the fronds are full and fresh, in their brightest shade of chartreuse. The peonies are in tight bud with the promise of a perfumed future. There is so much to embrace and cherish here and now.
And eventually we will make beauty out of the pool again. And it will be better and brighter than before, because it will happen when we are present, when we can be mindful, when we can take it in like we never did.
We won’t be looking back.
