Or Is This Real Life or Is This Just Covid-19?
Lately, I’ve been feeling sluggish and losing direction in life. It’s funny how life throws you a curveball and everything comes to a standstill. It’s certainly hard to imagine living frivolously through a difficult time such as this one when the realities and fragility of life comes at you hard and fast.
If I should be so lucky to live through this challenging time, will I simply forget these thoughts over time, counting my lucky stars that I, like many others narrowly avoided a catastrophe? Is rebuilding and recovering imminent, or does this mark a new beginning in our current world as we transition over to the next? These are the things I’ve been thinking about day in and day out. How about others who have faced life altering situations through losing loved ones, or the actuality of necessary (not precautionary) lockdowns and much more…
On good days, I laugh and joke with my friends online as we discuss developing situations around the world, howling at literature memes or learning and creating new things (thanks to the internet), even though I haven’t particularly felt interested in anything since we’ve begun to feel this imminent danger in our increasingly delicate lives. In the meantime, it’s heartwarming to see people band together to form organisations and campaigns to help different groups and clusters affected by this virus as well. I feel terribly blessed to have friends who are so keen on giving as much as they can, in turn inspiring me as well. It doesn’t necessarily offset the scammers and evil people doing what they’ll always be doing – but we just do what we can.
In reality, does death really matter? For me, it is a transition from this life over to the next so it doesn’t feel as bad as it could, and I think I can safely say that with each passing day, my heart believes it stronger as my faith grows, but as with everything, there are good and bad days so there is so much more to work on.
In the meantime, I am longing for the day where we are all blessed and we can emerge from our little caves to find meaning in the simple things (outside) once again. This poem has stuck with me since I read it close to a decade ago. It was inspired by a walk taken by Wordsworth and his sister, where they came across a long belt of daffodils near Gowbarrow park. There is so much hope and pleasure derived from seeing nature simply, doing its thing. What a dream.
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
by William Wordsworth
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:
For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.
Denise Taw 