It's been hot as Hades here in Southern California lately and of course, that means rolling blackouts as well as the non-rolled kind. The power outages in my area have been few and brief but they've made me think of something…
Since we all had to begin living in a Pandemic World, I've spent a lot of time saying the following to friends: Just wait it out. I understand fully the urge to complain about it and lament all the horrible things it's doing to so many lives but I think we all need to just accept it as something we (a) can't do much about and (b) just have to get through. There are many such things in our lives and I've likened this one to having the plain ol' flu to having a load of steer manure dumped in your living room.
(I have had the flu. I've never had the other thing.)
It occurs to me that the lockdown is a lot like having the electricity go out in your neighborhood. It's not your fault. It greatly limits what you can do and it impacts not just you but everyone around you. It may mean you can't do a lot of things you need to do including leaving your home. You have no idea when it will end. You need to find creative ways to work around some of it. You wish you'd been better prepared for it and you wish the government had done more to prevent it and was doing more to end it. And you can't do a damn thing to hurry it up. You just have to wait for it to be over.
This is not a perfect analogy. Power outages, for one thing. aren't that lethal. But there may be some comfort in remembering that there are things in life — bad, discomforting things — that we just have to get through…and we do.