Blizzard
It's been snowing very much today, although without the benefit of a snow day because it's a Saturday. We're all home today, quite bored.
You know, I'd love to have some large indoor space, something like a gym, to play games or exercise. Maybe that would clear up my mind and give me that sweet energy and vitality I seem to be missing. A little door inside the house that leads to it. The wind blows and snow falls like a blizzard outside, but in that indoor place I'd be inside to play badminton and pass the time.
Maybe this sentiment extends from how, despite sometimes being quite introverted, I want to be out and with people and having fun. Sometimes that doesn't work out so well and I want to go home, but sometimes it does work very well, and I'm left wanting to do it again.
It might also extend from how I don't like the winter all that much. Well, maybe not at all. Quarantine in summer 2020 and being snowed-in /are/ quite similar. But quarantine happened during the summer of 2020. During that, although I couldn't be with people, I somehow found deep solace in walking around outside and listening to the whispering trees in the warm breeze of July, in taking in the deep green vegetation and flowers that surrounded me in some places. It was quiet outside and I wasn't really able to have the "with people" fun that I might have wanted to have. But this meant that I had to go out of my way to be with people, since there were a lot of obstacles to doing that. I was in an "opt-out" isolation, so to speak. That summer was the best I'd had in recent memory: I explored memories from my childhood, worked on things, actually went outside, and, ironically, had begun my journey in overcoming my general anxiety around other people.
When snowed in, though, I can't go outside and enjoy the breeze. There definitely is a breeze, a strong one, but not one I'd enjoy. Today a blizzard rages outside and being out there for even a minute with my best cold protection would soak me. I'd also be very cold: both unpleasant things. This, then, for me, is the unpleasant kind of isolation. I can stay inside, but I can only be so far from the people in my house. I don't really want to be gone from them, but I also don't want to be totally attached to them to the point where they observe everything I do.
Yet, in both things, you feel a sense of isolation from normal "way" of things. Friday, being outside, doing work, feels as if eons ago. I am in a different world now, cushioned in sound and sight by this falling icy powder. In quarantine, I was in a warm, sunny, pleasant world that was isolated and silenced by fear of illness.
Maybe I have an idiosyncratic perspective of all this, because I wasn't active on social media back then. I didn't, in fact, have any social media besides an obscure Reddit account. I watched the news, but not often. I did my own thing, focused on the positive, and had fun in that safe warm haven outside where no one else seemed to be. Stress, as far as I was concerned, as I remember it, did not exist. I imagine that circumstance in total contrast to the now mental background of stress and environemntal background of this blinding blizzard.
As clearly as I know and have noted dozens of times in the past, though, you can't recreate past experiences as they occurred in the past. In other words, you can't remake a vibe. It has to fall into place, and isn't receptive to whatever doctored envrionment you create in an attempt to fabricate one for youself. The best choice, I think, lies in moving forward with that knowledge of the past, adapting to the circumstances of the now. I think that's the only way, because that's exactly how that "stress-free safe haven" experience crystallized for me back then. And it's the only way something positive like that, I think, can happen again.
2022-01-09