In many ways it may seem like the months ahead are a bleak prospect.
While COVID-19 restrictions are being slightly eased, including businesses, restaurants, galleries, museums and parks reopening, opportunities to take advantage of those will still be limited by physical distancing and hygiene requirements.
As we move toward the summer season, most of our usual distractions have cancelled or will be if they haven’t already.
There will be no football, no baseball, no Olympics, no concerts, no large gatherings of any kind.
Locally, there will be no Kispiox Rodeo, no Canada Day celebrations, no Midsummer Music Festival, no Witset Mud Bogs, no Pride, no Kispiox Valley Music Festival and no Fall Fair, just to name a few cherished events.
While most of these events have at one time or another not happened for various reasons, it is unprecedented that all would be cancelled in a single year.
We could moan and grown and complain about it.
We could argue about whether the measures were too extreme or not extreme enough, whether they’re being eased too soon or not fast enough.
But what good would it do?
We are where we are and when we are.
This is not the end of the world as we know it.
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Our beloved distractions and events will be back and maybe even bigger and better than before.
Instead, we could take heart and reflect on why these events are simultaneously so important to us in the moment and unimportant in the big scheme of things.
It has been said that absence makes the heart grow fonder.
Perhaps we should be looking at the current situation as an opportunity to rekindle our passion for the things we take for granted. Not just the big things, but the little things as well.
We are privileged to live in the time and place we do, this year as much as any other, perhaps more so.
In the future, when the organizations that bring us the things we are missing right now come calling for support, we would be well-served to remember 2020.
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