Still Weathering the Storm

I don’t know how it is where anyone reading this is living, but here in Ireland it’s not exactly getting any easier. At the beginning we knew where we were, the advice was clear, precise and easy to follow. Although we only had a caretaker government, I for one had faith that the decisions taken were considered ones. Just before the change in personnel though, the country skipped a stage of reopening, moving us forward quickly and this looking back is where many of the problems associated with reopening the country probably began.

We have had a new coalition government for some months now and things are going downhill fast. There seem to be conflicting views between officials about the way forward with the pandemic, fierce lobbying from interested parties such as airlines and ‘wet’ pubs to get everything opened faster and the numbers of Covid cases increasing everywhere with outbreaks in all kinds of places. The number of contacts everyone has has increased and contact tracing is also getting more complex it seems.

The upshot of all of this is that on one hand we are hearing that local lockdowns are the way forward and on the other being threatened with full lockdown if ‘we’ don’t get cases down. It no longer feels like collective responsibility and that we are ‘all in this together’.

A stressful situation is naturally being made worse by all of this, plus weekly announcements from everyone, where anything can happen it seems.

Not having had any kind of break we decided to look at booking short ‘staycations’ which has been an interesting experience as the first question has become not do we want to stay somewhere, but what is their cancellation policy. I know from talking with friends we are not alone in this but it is hard to know whether to chance it or not.

In amongst this uncertainty I am trying to listen to my own advice to live in the moment, one day at a time and so on but somethings do need to be planned in advance. Life even in a pandemic has to be lived otherwise it is just existing which is not the way things should be for any of us if we can help it.

So when we can’t do what we know we need to be doing and need new strategies to cope where can we go? I have mentioned this before and have no difficulty doing so again as it is something I am dipping in and out of; the free or almost free ebook (it depends where you download it from) Moon Books Collective ‘Weathering the Storm’

If you, like me need a bit of variety in your coping strategies as the situation changes and you haven’t yet got your copy yet, do go off and download it now.