BY LOOKING EASTERLY

BY LOOKING EASTERLY

(Easter Sunday 2021)

I’m sitting on one of my favourite benches along the Alouette greenway in Pitt Meadows, after a good 20 kilometre cycle.

Looking around at the beautiful scenery of farm lands and mountains, and the eagle soaring above my head, while listening to the sweet sounds of bicycle tires and feet navigating the flat rocky path, I hear myself saying “it’s really not been all that bad”.

This COVID-19 year has done a lot to everyone and isn’t it à propos, on this Easter Sunday, to define the year in terms of sacrifices — since Easter and sacrifices go hand in hand. 

This year we have all had to make many sacrifices and adjust the best we can every step of the way. We have had to create a pathway, a new pathway, to keep our lives together, to help ourselves and others survive, and to perhaps take stock of what is important, what our options are and then pave a different journey forward. I see it as an opportunity to house clean, downsize and find value in a new approach.

I am reflecting on the latter: pave a different journey.  There is definitely a lot about my different journey that I actually like very much.  I feel in control of my restricted freedom. It has been a freedom built above the pillars of strict public health Orders but, in a way, those pillars have become a new moral code — a challenge to my ability to make adjustments, to dig myself out of a COVID rut, to see things differently, try new things, push my potential forward, redefine my standards and carve a new type of happy, fulfilling lifestyle.

As I look easterly on this Easter Sunday, from this scenic spot in my own community, I see more blue sky, a field of Canada geese, some alpacas, sheep and horses, happy people, happy cyclists, and a bicycle ready to take me home following a different path.

Lives have moved from what was standard and normal, to nothing at all standard and a far cry from normal. The impact of COVID has created a new reality for everyone —in a way, for me, it is like starting a new novel but unraveling a different intriguing story, in the same setting, with some of the same characters and some refreshingly new ones, celebrating new experiences, at a different pace, and welcoming this new reality which may well become the new celebrated norm with a few more interesting and intriguing adventures.

And on we must go …