Soon I will not have to live via Zoom only. I have the same mixture of excitement and apprehension I always had at the beginning of a university semester. New options. A chance to restructure my time. Two weeks from Monday I will be two weeks past my second vaccination shot. I will be out and about – still masked – as safe as can be. What an odd thought. Since mid-March, I have been home alone and have not gone anywhere, not even to the grocery store. I have relied on InstaCart and Door Dash. Before the pandemic, my calendar was full. I overbooked. Since then my Zoom calendar has been full. I have structured my days around Zoom meet-ups, songwriting sessions, webinars and courses. I traded in person commitments for online ones.
I do not want my pre-pandemic schedule back.. Anyone with me on this? Before the pandemic almost everything on my calendar was in some way connected to music although I said I wanted to be more involved in other things. I had few days at home.. Since I have had all days at home with fewer options, I have devoted as many if not more hours to music. Just to be sure I had enough to do, I enrolled in blog building and book writing courses and webinars. Songwriting, blog building, and book writing became my focuses. Three major focuses are too many. I was already questioning if each is worth being a major focus. Am I taking for granted and not focusing on something equally or more important? How many unrelated yet wonderful things am I missing because I am so focused on these three things. Now that I will have more options, I wonder even more what I want to do. One would think that at seventy-five I would have answers. I imagine there are people my age whose lives are in comfortable and satisfying grooves, people who no longer go through angst, people who just know what they want. I also accept I have never been and will never be one of those people. Therefore, I blog… on and on.
Knowing I will no longer be living via Zoom but will have live options is enough for now. I do not have to have the answers to my questions. What will I leave in? What will I leave out? What will I add? Time will tell.
(If you are an email subscriber, consider yourself a beta reader reading a first draft. Almost always, I come back and edit. I always catch typos later.)