Elder Advice Thinking Inside the Box- Week 15
Week 15. Like most of you, I am not sick with it, but certainly sick of it. My position on COVID is now, officially, fetal.
Toronto has entered phase 2. Remind me, to go into a store now, do I need a mask or a brick?
To avoid, for another week, a trip to the rope store … and later to the rickety stool store … I made a TO DO list for when the world returns to some semblance of normal. It’s short because, from the looks of spiking COVID graphs everywhere, by the time that happens, I may not be able to chew my own food:
1. I am going to start helping out the people who write horoscopes by living way more generally. I’m going to ignore feelings of awkwardness. And find a friend, or someone else, who might need help, and possibly do something.
2. I’m going to start being intolerant of more than just lactose if people don’t smarten up. “People” being those who have made a profession of being perpetually offended. Who lie in wait for the mis-steps of others and the opportunity to pounce and scold. Rather than actually doing something useful. Wait a minute … I think that To Do is Done.
Like I said, it’s a short list.
What I would really like to do is have some actual fun, with people, in person. I did some work recently for a young couple who, but for COVID, would have been married today – June 26. I suggested they let me plan and attend the rescheduled event, and make sure it’s fun. I proposed that the wedding photographer be a millennial – who only takes selfies. And that all the speeches be by the bride’s ex-fiancee. They seemed oddly reluctant to take my advice. Go figure.
Elder Advice? We all need some cheering up. Continuing to sit at home, sewing masks or making used surgical gloves into condoms is no longer enough. For those concerned, for whatever reason, about participating in the social turmoil which the Fates have maliciously added to the pandemic, let me suggest this. Take a deep breath. Go to a local park. Strike up a conversation with a total stranger – at two arms lengths of course. No personal information need be exchanged - only what challenges each faces and what joys each carries. Perhaps you will find out if and how he or she avoided the relentless pressure to cocoon and be entirely self-absorbed. Perhaps you will become more sympathetic to the plight of others, and less reluctant to add some small part of their burdens to your own. And in the process, you might rediscover the reason why an unimportant, weak, slow, wingless, clawless and armourless species controls the planet. Community.
Or you may find out he’s one of those assholes who would manspread on a life raft.
I'm here to give advice, not guarantee outcomes.