Grasping for Hope

Have you ever given inanimate objects more credit for your future than they deserve?

I have. Earlier this month, I found myself getting to the end of my current writing journal. You may have seen the cover of it in a past blog or newsletter. It says "Organized Chaos" on the front. I have to admit it wasn't my first choice for cover designs, but like with clothes--often I go for comfort over style--the choices of journals with coptic binding were few and so I snatched it up. The important part is the inside (wow--what an unintentional, but heartwarming truth:) with its empty lined pages. 

As Organized Chaos came to a close and school was starting, I pulled my next journal out from under a pile of clothes. (How I knew it was there, I have no idea. And why it had remained there--also, no idea.)

The next journal said, "Sunny Skies Ahead" on its cover. The colors were muted and everything looked calm about it. It was quite the follow-up to multi-colored, metallic organized chaos. That's when I started to believe, to genuinely hope, that the journal was making promises we all know it couldn't keep. Once I opened that blank journal I would be leaving chaos behind and sunny skies would open up and usher in the calm that everybody's been longing for after several years of not-quite-calm-at-all. 

---

I suppose that's how desperate I am (we all are) as I grasp for a sign of hope somewhere--anywhere!
​

Being a New Englander I feel I have a leg up on unpredictability in life. I grew up used to wonky, random weather. It's cold, then hot, followed by a freak blizzard. Covid is the New England weather equivalent of viruses--only, instead of heading out to stock up on milk and bread and hunker down, toilet paper and tylenol top the list and that's only what you'll need if you're lucky.

Even if you don't catch Covid, a close contact or a near miss requiring a test or quarantine upends everything. Events, reunions, final exams, business trips, weddings and celebrations planned months before are suddenly not happening. Off the table completely. At least with weather there's the chance of bringing things indoors or holding it on a rain date. But, not with pesky, petulant, wild-card Covid.

It's pencils down.
Wait and see.
Wait some more.
Eventually cancel completely or postpone indefinitely.

But, back to my journal. This inanimate Nostradamus.
It is proclaiming that there are "Sunny Skies Ahead." That's a direct quote!
I know it's foolish, but I have to believe it. I'm hitching my wagon to it.
Giddyup! Heeyah!

Sunny skies--here we come:)

---