YOUR POST PANDEMIC SELF

I have always been a practical, pragmatic person with a need to create with a great need to learn how to do things. And I still am and do. So I must build a post pandemic me. There’s no returns to normal. It does not exist. And I have chosen to stay alive in Paris and be joyous till death do us part. So I have time on my side. I am not going anywhere else. For now.

So I need to know how to live with joy and be happy today. Don’t guess what will happen because no one knows. God and the universe are still working on it. I wrote earlier about a new life in the new year but now it is a reality. It is time to get our tools out .

As for me, I have a brain that works. And I have core beliefs. So I am in process. It is exciting.

I save things I read that touch me and if I really want to, I share them with you. And I have two different posts to share today. Now I don’t know where all this is coming from or going to but I am taking you along for the ride. Okay?

Yes, I know. There are things I used to do, like going to stores, lunches with friends, events and dinners but it is all new. New everything. Why? It is a new you. The post pandemic you. And you can choose what you want that to be. I am still deciding what I need with my other considerations. I am in process…. I am unpredictable.

What do you choose?

I choose to be excited about the change going on…

I love this article. It was written by a young woman and posted on Facebook USA. Her name is Jonatha Brooks. –

“What did she know? and when did she know it? That was today’s 4am thought. And it wasn’t about politics. It was about this photo. Me, at 7.

It was about braggadocio, moxie, the wild fearlessness we have before we start editing ourselves. Before we make ourselves smaller so we don’t tread on others’ toes and feelings.

As I remember it, 7 might have been my fiercest age. We were living in an apartment building in SW8, Kensington, in London. My parents were preoccupied with their own drama – way above my head at the time; my brothers were off trying to survive the culture shock of their schools.

So I had the run of the place. I climbed out on the front awnings, spied on neighbors, learned all the neighborhood churchyards by heart, held court with the building’s porters. They called me “Ginger.”

I was in heaven. I loved my strict Church of England School, “Francis Holland School for Girls.” The uniform, the curtseys. I started studying ballet. I was learning French. I got invited to fancy birthday parties at Eaton Terrace homes. Alice Nunnelly, Francesca Hordern. The names were enough.

I think my inner compass (thank goodness) honed its true North there and then.

We moved back to the US when I was 9. I hated it. I was miserable. I missed the order, the rigor, the independence. French.

But I kept dancing – maybe the discipline and physical escape protected the remains of that effortless wildness.

I have lately found myself making myself smaller for no good reason. Maybe it’s the relentless tumult of the last few years. Maybe it’s another birthday.

But finding this picture was an awesome reminder.

That little sprite knew everything she needed to know, right when she needed to know it.

She still does.

Cheers to YOUR inner sprites today.

#jonathabrooke #innersprite #innerknowing

And the second article that I want to share with you is a post that I read in several places on Facebook USA , and I love it. It touches my soul. I I think it applies to the world as well as the USA. But first, a cartoon –

“I’m Really Tired of Hatred

JANUARY 16, 2022 / JOHN PAVLOVITZ

“Yesterday while picking up lunch I ran into a friend I hadn’t seen in a few months.

After exchanging surprised greetings and a fierce hug—she stopped abruptly, looked genuinely concerned and said, “Are you OK? You look tired today.”

After weathering the initial sting of her honest but uninvited commentary, I assured her she was somewhat incorrect in her evaluation.

“Not just today.” I remarked matter of factly. “This is how I look now—I’m always tired.”

She smiled widely and then leaned in with genuine concerned and quietly pressed for details: “So what are you tired of?”

I couldn’t come up with an answer that seemed sufficient in the thirty seconds we had remaining before our takeout orders were ready (and honestly I didn’t feel right baring my soul surrounded by complete strangers in front of a full deli case) so I laughed and said, “Oh, you know!”—and quickly changed the subject.

But on the way home her question was still hanging there in my head: What am I tired of?

Hatred.

That’s it. I’m tired of hatred—like, really tired.

I’m tired of waking every morning and seeing that we’re in an another unnecessary and preventable Constitutional crisis.

I’m tired of having to once again channel the adrenaline to confront a new onslaught of real and manufactured emergencies.

I’m tired of having to desperately appeal to public servants to do the decent and humane thing and seeing them again flatly refuse.

I’m tired of trying to convince professed followers of Jesus that they’re supposed to care about other people.

I’m tired of dancing through minefields at family gatherings; doing verbal gymnastics to sidestep relational explosions and to keep loving people I’ve recently learned unsettling things about.

I’m tired of scrolling through racist, anti-LGBTQ, anti-immigrant, anti-Semitic hate speech filling my social media mentions.

I’m tired of being reminded daily of the white supremacy that my former church friends are so terribly afflicted with.

I’m tired of seeing stories of newly-emboldened bigots showing up as neighbors, elementary school teachers, local politicians, and coffee shop patrons—because they feel they’ve had a kindred embittered spirit in the White House for four years.

I’m tired of boastful, nonsensical, intentionally-provocative tweets littered with Democrat slander, wall-building taunts, and abject lies.

I am so damn tired of hatred—and yes, I’m tired of hating it all too.

I’m tired of continually confronting ugliness—and of the increasing ugliness it brings out in me as I do.

I’m tired of walking into a room and trying to calculate inside my head, how many of them there are—and resenting human beings I’ve never met based on my evaluation.

I’m tired of assuming the worst in people because the bumper sticker on their car or the red hat atop their head or the channel they get their news from.

I’m tired of the impatience and irritability always sitting just below the surface of my countenance, and how often it breaks violently through and into my day in angry words in traffic or expletives spoken under my breath or easy frustration with the normal inconveniences of life.

I’m tired of regularly losing my religion as I fight both for and with my faith tradition: being anything but Christlike while advocating for the teachings of Jesus.

I’m tired of feeling a growing hopelessness when I see the people we’re becoming.

I know this fight is emotionally and physically exhausting, that there is a profound personal cost for hating things, even things that merit hatred. I know that it makes my heart less buoyant and far more susceptible to sinking into despair.

I’m trying to make sure I stay a loving person opposing things that make me angry, and not a perpetually angry person—but it’s difficult to tell when you’re swimming in so much enmity every day.

I want to leave a legacy of kindness, a compassionate wake in the waters of this world so that other people who are similarly fatigued by the hatred they encounter here, find rest in me.

Maybe that’s all any of us can do: perpetuate decency and goodness and generosity in the infinitesimal space of the next choice in front of us.

Maybe if we make this world a little bit more loving in the small and the close and the present, maybe the ripples will eventually reach the big and the distant in the future.

Then maybe everyone who’s as fully tired of hatred as we are—will finally get some rest.”

Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead, let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?
~ Rumi