Not me, but my son…for the second time. The first was when his flat mate at uni developed Covid symptoms. Once it was over we packed him up and brought him home as all his classes had moved online. This time it was a colleague at the fast food restaurant he works at who tested positive. At least on this occassion his has his bigger TV and better Wifi.
Although I don’t need to isolate it has meant I have stopped the welfare visits to my mum to keep her safe, which feels crappy as its only just over a month since Dad died. But, we are embracing FaceTime which is certainly a lot better for us both than texting. I think the convenience of the multitude of messaging apps we have makes it too easy to forget about the benefits of more traditional forms of communication such as talking face-to-face or on the phone. A while back a good friend, who I message very frequently, rang me out of the blue. I instantly though something was wrong. He called simply because he realised we had not spoken for a long time. After 40 minutes on the phone with him, talking about nothing in particular, I felt really good. Such a simple act seems to be able to pick you up.
I have had few sessions of crying over dad, and I have questioned myself as to why. I didn’t get an answer. I discussed this with my girlfriend and she reminded me I had in reality been grieving for almost a year since we nearly lost dad in the early part of 2020. Currently this is the most plausible explanation but I know its probably not the final answer. The tears are not flowing but there is definitely a blanket of sadness that is ever present. There will be many triggers that will remind me of dad, and I am sure some will come with tears but others a smile.
Fed up with none of my clothes fitting and the hit that has on my self esteem I rejoined the gym. The slots are limited to 75 minutes and with the extra cleaning of the equipment its quite a compact workout time. I smashed out 5km on the treadmill them 3km on the rower. Pleased with this result I then celebrated with a Krispy Kreme doughnut…don’t judge me. Every journey starts with a single step and the route to success contains many small changes. And in my defence, who builds a Krispy Kreme next door to the gym? My will power was tested and found wanting! I will get my eating habits back under control, I need to loose about 9kg and with the success I had earlier this year I am confident I will hit that target.
I only have 7 working days before I break up from work for Christmas. This time will give me the space to reflect on 2020, a year that started with a bucket list event of celebrating Hogmanay in Edinburgh, finished with loosing my dad and with a global pandemic kicking off somewhere in-between. There is certianly a lot to reflect on, it’s been one hell of a year. My determination to make sure these events trigger positive changes is growing stronger, I now need to pull the plan together.
Total Wellbeing 