Anyone who is grieving right now my heart goes to you. I found myself praying for peace today. I understand this world is not a place of ease. The place where happiness and sadness are only players, waiting for their turn to play.

How is your heart? A friend recently asked me. My heart is too busy to be a heart I replied. Is your heart still racing back and forth longing for a return to normality because mine does? We can choose to walk through it dragging our old self or we can walk through with little luggage ready to imagine this world is temporary and we will return to our lord and I am ready to return I replied. She asked when are we going to meet. I say after a year and war. She chuckled & asked; when does this war ends? I say the time we meet.

I use to think calamities were hard because certain things are just objectively difficult to bear. I thought there was a master list, a standard hierarchy of difficulty. The death of loved ones for example, is always harder to bear than getting a traffic ticket. It seems obvious enough. But I have realized in past few months, the condition in which death of loved ones took place is more difficult to bear than normal death. Such as loved ones died in a plane crash or in isolation ward at the hospital in pandemic.

There is a strange sadness. Its not the kind that leaves you empty or lonely, or even wanting. It’s the still kind the kind that comes from a certain level of understanding and acceptance. I started this week of lockdown by reflecting on things lost to me due to the pandemic. It’s the kind of loss that felt too trivial to engage with earlier on but I think its so important to engage with all our feelings, big or small, and allow them the space they need to breath/heal/dissipate.Its unnecessary burden to carry, these ever morphing emotion. Rearrange some of that load and maybe let go of what you don’t need for the journey ahead.

I am keeping a lockdown journal so I can have something to look back at and wonder: did we really go through that? For the first time today, I asked myself if all my journals before lockdown will be the ones I will look at and wonder: was life really like that?

I have cleared up my writing desk after months of inactivity, mostly to make spaces for the possibility of writing again.This world crisis opend our eyes and helped us to focus on ourselves, to reset our goal, and to more importantly be grateful for what we have.