June 2020
It’s been a strange few months. The more I speak with friends and family, the more evident it becomes that the Coronavirus pandemic has affected people in different ways. Some businesses have thrived, others have shut up shop and hibernated. Some people have enjoyed retreating from the world, taken the chance to spend time with close family or to pursue a hobby. Others have struggled with worry about the future, anxiety for loved ones and, in some cases, bereavement. We have not been immune.
Yet we drown and swim and surface from the experience in our own way. I hear judgemental statements about the actions of our neighbours, when no one really knows or understands the science behind the rules handed down by different governments. In France, we keep a metre apart, in Australia, it’s a metre and half, in the UK they are deliberating the effectiveness of the two-metre rule. Who is right? All, and none.
This photograph of a lone walker along the Camino de Santiago reminded me that we all tread this path alone. There may be friends around us, but our attitude and our emotional state belong only to us.
As we emerge from lockdown, some more tentatively than others, fingers crossed that Covid19 really is retreating, let’s hope for a kinder and more grateful world.