December 2020

I’ve been home for a little over nine months now. You would think something would have come of that time and stuff has, just maybe not the stuff you might imagine. I’ve painted. I’ve taken photos. I’ve written. I’ve read. I’ve learned to interact to others via a plethora of online platforms.

I had gone to a lecture at the Clark and felt like I had a headache. Didn’t much enjoy the presentation, drove home and went to bed. Was sick with mildly flu-like symptoms and was more than glad to stay in bed napping for quite a number of days, long enough that for the first time in my working history I had to go to a doctor for a note in order to return to work. By then it was clear that something was going on. I had no way of knowing if I’d had the flu (yes, I’d gotten the shot), bronchitis, or whatever this new virus was. But I went to the doctor and he had nothing to offer because now, two weeks later, I was well. I seized the moment to get a test for Lyme and other tick-borne diseases which came back negative.

I got the note and sent it in and then my workplace was shut down.

So began my time at home. I stayed home a little longer, just to be sure about whatever it was I had early in March. Then work evolved and food shopping turned to delivery and pick up and life went on. I officially started doing real work-from-home stuff in early June. In September I signed up officially to do that for six months. And then another round of scheduling fuzziness ended my research into different retirement scenarios and my last working day was October 28. After that I was on “vacation” for a little over a month and now I am officially retired.

Last night I erased the computer I’d been sent to work on and packaged it up. I cleared out a little drawer that held a stack of post it notes – tallies of each day’s work. Yes our work was trackable online – so many interactions over the course of the day and all, but for me, it was a pleasure to tick each chat and perhaps note what the question was. I think the largest number of ticks was 46 or 48. Some days, due to outages or events were much lower. Thirty plus was the norm. I laughed as I quickly flipped through the stack looking at all the slashes. Each a person, for a few minutes or longer.

Now, as I have since March, I can take a few minutes to look around each morning as I go out to offer my coffee grounds to the garden or get the mail. The things to see are many. I fill the bird feeders. I look at the sky. I don’t have a long daily commute to think about things or listen to audio books, although I’ve finished several long audio books since being home. My Prius was showing 112.2 “mpg” the other day because many of my travels are within the electric range of the car. I don’t stop in a store just to look around. I took a pass on the normal Thanksgiving because it seemed like the best thing to do.

Today is 42 days away from Inauguration Day and that is good, even though the fight goes on to turn our country towards what it was before 2016 and maybe towards what we would like it to be. The fight continues to keep people healthy. The stay at home thing continues. So I look around and see what the world has to offer each morning and go from there.

To live a creative life, we must lose our fear of being wrong.
— Joseph Chilton Pearce