Anne and I are beginning our seventh week of self-isolation, and it truly is difficult; especially not being able to see our family except on a small screen. But I have some musings about it that might be worth considering.
Let’s start with my favourite method of putting things into perspective: if this is the worst thing that happens to us in 2020 it will qualify as a good year because it will mean that eight months from now we and our loved ones will still have our health.
Six weeks represents just .0014% of my lifetime, and I’m fairly optimistic that we are over half-way to things beginning to loosen up. So if we were able to handle the last six weeks, a few more should be a piece of cake.
I remember well the last two years of World War II. Two of my brothers were fighting overseas, one as a commando in Norway and the other as an anti-aircraft gunner in Holland and Belgium (although we didn’t know these details at the time). As a young lad, every time I heard an airplane (which was quite often because we lived only sixty miles from the busy Summerside, PEI airforce base) I wondered if it was a German bomber. And every time someone knocked on our door my mother would jump because she was afraid it was a telegram being delivered advising us that Ronnie or Art had been killed. They both returned safely in 1945, but because I was an infant when they enrolled in 1939 this was really the first time I knew them. I also lived through the polio epidemic of the late 40s and early 50s, which lasted more than a year.
What we’re all going through right now is awful; but those other two were pretty scary, too.
Keep well everyone, and try to find at least one thing to laugh about every day.