David Johnson

August 2022

Hello Friend,

Well if one thing could define August to me, it would be COVID. After, how long is it, two and half years since the initial breakout? After watching COVID travel around the world. Following Maui become so quiet with no visitors allowed in. Watching the vaccines being rolled out, and tensions rise as debates raged about when to ease a particular restriction or let life return to normal (will that ever be possible?), only for some restrictions to be tightened again. After traveling across to Europe a couple of times and still dodging the COVID bullet. After the world changed in ways that three years ago I don’t believe any of us would have imagined, COVID finally found me two weeks into August 2022.

I write this three weeks after testing positive and six days after testing negative, and I am not out of the woods yet. Fatigue has been my biggest struggle. It feels like a slow crawl out of a hole, but I’m getting there, that I do notice in me.

I realize through all of this that I also have a lot to be grateful for. I might have been the most unwell that I have been for many years, but I still have my life. We all know, even if just through the news, those who lost theirs due to COVID. Of those who couldn’t get to say “goodbye” to loved ones.

I think that through all of this, through all that has happened over the last two plus years I sense that I haven’t really taken it all in and processed what the implications are, how it has effected me. And I wonder how true that is for the world at large? I march on with my life, but I do try and find time to sit and reflect through meditation, writing, just sitting quietly, on the happenings of the last three year, and to me some of this just feels like a lot to take in. Perhaps through a lack of time, perhaps due to my own avoidance, or perhaps because some events simply need time to process and I am still working through that time…whatever the reason, for me I feel that I still have some personal work to do to process the time and the mark that COVID has left of me…on us.

Story

One thing that I have found very present in my life of late has been the idea of Story. In short that revolves around my story, what I have done in my almost 60 years (next year) on the planet. I don’t know why this subject is feeling more present right now? Maybe because of the awareness that 60 is not far away? But the reason be as it may, I am aware that as I reflect back on my life - you’ll see some photographs from the past below - that there is also some deeper reflection behind the surface images. I am not sure what story comes out of that, but I sense something there that I would benefit from exploring.

To this end I have started capturing thoughts as they arise. I have no plan for how this project will evolve or when it might finish. I am just acknowledging its presence in my thoughts and interest, and so am simply following that lead for now. Manifestations of this exploration could appear in future blog posts and newsletters.

This month’s posts

Below are some posts that I made during August, mostly early on in August before I became unwell. While I had aspirations to document my time through COVID, apart from a couple of short posts as I emerged from the other side, I simply did not feel up to it.

As ever, thank you for reading,
David.