11/21/2020
I haven’t been posting in a while. I’ve had my own personal experiences with covid and have been doing what so many people are doing to get through death of family members and lack of control over rules related to little to no visitation related to my elderly parents. Covid has affected so many people, even those without direct contact. It’s a blanket of weight that hangs around through every decision we make.
Reading this post this morning has had positive effect on me and will hopefully have one for you. We must all find different ways to care for ourselves right now. We must care for ourselves! We must seek moments of joy we can find by doing things we enjoy. We have time to discover what those things might be. It doesn’t matter whether whether we are “good” at something if we enjoy doing it... find those moments of joy amidst this difficult time.
“When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of ‘getting to know you,’ questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.
And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, ‘
‘Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”
And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: ‘ I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.’
And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could ‘Win’ at them.”
Kurt Vonnegut:
