Here Comes The Sun
Today was the last day in Seattle that the sun will go down before 5 p.m. I celebrated by starting the day playing “Here Comes the Sun” on the radio and ending my workday by going for a walk at 4:45. I’m not usually bothered by the gloominess of Pacific Northwest winters. In fact, the constant drizzle is more than made up for by the abundant green of the evergreen forests and ferns. Green and grey every day. But like all things, my tolerance of weather is different this year.
I long for sun. I long for warmer days when we can be outside for hours, using our full yard, going to the many untraveled hiking trails and using up our energy. I feel like I haven’t been properly tired for months, only in some sort of hibernatory haze where every day looks and feels the same. It doesn’t help that everything outside these four walls feels so momentous, so life and death. But here it’s all the same.
We’re watching as our world changes around us, for good and bad, and there’s not much we can do about it. What we can do, most of us have already done. At the same time, all we hear are calls that we’re not doing enough, even as our daily lives are increasingly exhausting. Forrest and I are tired. The kids are worn down. And all of it is taking a toll on us.
Our book club read “Dead Wake” this last month, a book about the sinking of the Lusitania. I had suggested it and in the discussion, someone asked me why on earth I would want to pick a book that had so much death in it. I realized as I was trying to respond that I like reading history because even in these huge events, people are just…people. Yes, big decisions are made at high levels, but for most of us? It’s keeping on in the best way we know how. It reassures me.
It reminds me that living through hard times is often more hard than exciting. Yes, there are truly horrific places in history that I would hate to be. But most times, for most of us, being part of history is making the small choices that we do have in the middle of terrible constraints. It’s making the time for someone who is struggling. It’s donating if we can. It might even be just making it to the next hour and the next and the next.
And that’s ok. Sometimes the only way to escape the grey is to wait it out. After all, the sun set at 4:59 today and it’s only going to get brighter from here.
