So, our business meeting this morning was a little chilly for the latter part of May, but the sun was out and it still smelled like early summer and the hedgerows were coming out in full bloom.
Diggers has been at Grandma and Grandad’s for a few days as we had to go down to Bath for a funeral. As we walked I let Diggers get acclimatized back to his familiar places, nose down tail in the air. He was away with the familiar scents of rabbits, squirrels and of course, ever hopeful of that discarded cheese sandwich in the ditch!
We walked and I reflected on the last couple of weeks. They had been strange…. The bathroom renovations had been rather stressful because of unforeseen problems and large companies hiding behind the ‘Covid Times’ as an excuse not to deliver service to customers. Delays and costs increased, but it was done now (apart from an Electrician that has gone AWOL) and it was worth the issues, the costs and the three weeks without a bath as we are very pleased with it.
The anniversary of my special guardian angel and the little signs I always get around this time which affirm to me that she is still close by and aware of how my life has panned out - always my guiding light.
It had also been the first week back to doing some face-to-face classes. I am only doing two…. Not nearly 30 like pre-pandemic times. I found I didn’t like it, I felt the most vulnerable I had felt for a long time. I found the environment that I am so used to, strangely alien and I realised that my decision to keep my business online was the right one for me. I still believe that the way we help people with fitness will change and the gym and leisure centre culture will not be as strong as before.
Then, I reflected on the last couple of days. My wife and I had travelled to Bath for her Grandmother’s funeral. It was the furthest we had travelled for over a year and the most amount of people we had been with for that time too. The service itself was obviously carried out to Covid regulations. Instead of singing hymns we listened to a recording from the crematorium’s library of hymns no doubt (something that must have been purchased during these ‘strange times’) because we were unable to sing the hymns, I found they lost their meaning and we were just left with a kind of choral ‘muzac’ that just filled a space in the schedule. The service was shorter because of guidelines and restrictions and it all felt rather strange and unfitting. For a lady that had such a long life (93 years), it felt like a brief and perfunctory acknowledgement. I pondered on this and couldn’t help thinking that it would have been more meaningful if we had just had 15 minutes of contemplation in the room remembering her in our own private way rather than through this forced, pre-recorded ‘normality’ - that isn’t normal at all. I feel we need to get real and understand that ‘normal’ has changed - when we get over that we can start to look at ways of creating a new way forward. After the funeral we were with people…… again,something that we have avoided for well over a year. This was surreal in itself as, apart from my wife obviously and my sister in-law, these were not the people I would have thought or imagined in the depths of lockdown to be the first people I longed to mix with when allowed! But, at the end of the day, it was for my wife’s ‘Nanny’ and even though it was a strange send off, it was a time to remember her and to say goodbye.
So, it still made me think about this yearning for ‘normality’ that I hear, see and read all about at the moment. The pre-recorded hymns at the funeral (because we can t sing them so we’d better have them anyway but listen to them instead - wouldn’t silence and reflection be an alternative? ), the people on the news are rushing off on holiday to foriegn countries because they want to get some sun and they didn’t go last year…… I think to myself that if anything this period of enforced restrictions may have given us all time to reflect and think about what ‘normal’ was doing to us, we went along with the momentum of it all because ‘that was the norm’.... We’ve had time to assess that and I’ve certainly made changes to what my normal looked like. You can’t always see it when blindly going through it day-after-day. Maybe we shouldn’t be looking at rushing back to ‘a bit of normality’, but embracing a new way of doing things….
I thought back to a quote that I have always remembered from my University days, a quote by the founder of the Herman Miller Furniture empire, Max De Pree……
“ We cannot become what we want by remaining what we are”.
I turned the corner and found Diggers in the ditch, I think he had found his prize…… the meeting was over.
