Look back, move forward

It’s been a long five weeks or more for all of us.

Whether you’re an essential employee, someone working from home, or someone whose job has temporarily (or worse, permanently) vanished, there’s plenty in past weeks you probably want to forget about.

On top of COVID-19 fears, illness and deaths, there’s been the absolute horror of mass murder.

These past five weeks, and certainly more, are going to be a time that many will want to forget. To a large extent, memory won’t let us — that’s just the way it works. This dark period of time will mark us all — to different extents, of course, but mark us it will.

Memory works another way, too. It may hold onto the worst, but in there as well is the warehouse of the best, the brightest, the most vivid.

This may sound a little sappy — but make a list.

We’re in spring, the time of year when, normally, we’re revelling in things that have come back to life. It’s pretty clear that we’re not going to get to enjoy it to the extent that we usually do.

So make a list. Not so much a to-do list, as an “I’m going to do” list.

It could be as simple as promising yourself a visit to the french fry truck. You remember — that greasy, hot, crispy rush of indulgence, the salt and ketchup, the sun on the back of your neck as you wait for your order to come up. It can be as long or as short as you like. Make a commitment to see and enjoy friends when we can do that again. Commit to enjoying family, even if its members are dispersed widely. Pick an experience, a place from your memory and plan to go there again — even if those plans have to range well into the future.

We are the stockpile of our life experiences. We’ve seen wonder and grace, felt love and pain, and get to draw the best of things up again. A night you’d never forget, a sunrise both unique and humbling. The particular metal smell that comes after rain on a warm day in high summer. The sound of a robin’s song in the early grey-blue light at dawn.

Make a list of the things you want to do as we move forward — because forward is the only way we can go.

This is a strange thing for a newspaper to say, but here it is.

Delve into your memory for better times, and count on that uniquely human attribute: hope. Hope for each other, hope for the future.

Take one small good thing in your hands and hold it close.