I was a little excited but mostly blorft. “Blorft” is an adjective I just made up that means ‘Completely overwhelmed but proceeding as if everything is fine and reacting to the stress with the torpor of a possum.’ I have been blorft every day for the past seven years. (Tina Fey)
. . . what you’re needing is not to be in a different place but to be a different person. (Seneca)
There is a cold, bleak, wintry-mix-sound on the porch this morning, and Hank made haste taking care of business before demanding a return to his warm bed, 30 seconds top. And then I read an email from a dear friend whose husband is a fellow weather freak like me, and I quote: (our) weather guy says we’re going to get “slammed.” 70 % chance of 10+ inches and 40% chance of 20+ inches, “storm of the century.”
Will 2020 never end? With two more days before the storm of the century, should I go to the grocery store this morning in the wintry mix, or wait for the sunshine promised tomorrow, and face crowds? Do I even need groceries?
Am I excited? You betcha. Altho’ not as much as snowstorms usually thrill me. Nine months of pandemic have raised my Adrenalin-Standard, and even for a weather-freak, the return-to-childhood-innocent-excitement at the anticipation of a big snow is tempered by something less innocent, and more in the “oh, s___” category. Something within me has already been on high alert for too long now, and is pooped.
Which is probably why, even tho’ I have used this time of necessary isolation over the last several months to become much more “fit,” my recent medical lab results were really out of kilter. Most discouraging. But the reality is that I’m out of balance in almost every way. Maybe we all are, expressed in many different ways — physically, attitudinally, behaviorally, emotionally — it would certainly account for all the dysfunctionality and societal angst we seem to face, huh? A worn-out people, fighting a war of a different kind, one for which we were ill-prepared, on many fronts.
How long will it take ’til our systems adapt to this as a new normal, a reality that is all we know? Countless people throughout the centuries have done it before we happened along. Maybe we just got wrapped up in our 20-21st century complacency and assumptive entitlement.
Wow, that sounds harsh. I might be angry. I don’t feel the anger, tho’, just the ever present on-high-alert experience within, that which gets me up at three in the morning now, to sit “Under the Christmas Tree” to have a conversation with God and you.
Deep breathing time.