May 25, 2022

Thoughts and Prayers

I think a lot about sharing space while I’m swimming in the pool. I try really hard and sometimes fail to be patient. My ire is reserved for the people who wait at the wall until I too arrive at the end, and then they take off, and I have to wait. Or the very fast swimmer in the pool yesterday who was so much faster than everyone else, and kept overtaking me at the end of the lane so that I’d have to wait once they’d taken off again, and I wonder if they’d considered how much they were interrupting my flow. But of course my slower pace was messing with theirs. When I used to swim at the university pool, I was on the slower side of medium, but now that I swim at the community centre with an older demographic, I’m kind of a hotshot. I swim at a very even pace, and it annoys me when other people don’t, which is a metaphor for a lot of things. It’s interesting that I find the idea that everybody swim at a very even pace more than reasonable when the fact is that everyone’s in the pool for a different reason, some people with training regimens, timed swims, swimming sprints. How easy it is to determine what you do is reasonable. I want to question those assumptions. But I also think all of us need to be aware of the other people all around us.

*

The other day I was confessing how disheartened I’d become with politics, and the response I got was, “But you’ve still got to keep fighting.” And I think I can’t. I think my problem is with the verb, “to fight.” I’m looking for a different mode of engagement, I think. Keep going, keep being, keep learning, keep changing. But I can’t fight. It’s not me, and it’s not sustainable. And of course, I’m conflicted about this. Imagine if Rosa Parks had decided not to fight, John Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr. Sometimes I worry that 70 years ago against the civil rights movement, I would have still be put off fighting and calling for civility, and that idea is shameful to me. But then I think about our abysmal provincial government, the Minister of Education whose Twitter bio has always read, “Fighting for you…” Because he’s fighting too. Which is weird, because he’s the one in power—shouldn’t he have levelled up from fighting now? You’ve got to wonder about the rules of engagement. What if none of this is actually a game? What if the stakes are real and we all have to work together?

*

I am heartbroken and sad. I am tired of being heartbroken and sad. I am lucky that I get to be tired of being heartbroken and sad instead of being so steeped in sadness and heartbreak that other possibilities aren’t available to me. I’ve seen the photos of the children who were murdered, posing with their Honour Roll certificates issued in a ceremony the same day they died, how their moms and dads came to see them, how hard they worked, their teachers. How hard it’s been to be a teacher…forever, but especially in the past two years. I think of my kids’ teachers, I think of my kids, how fragile and precious all of this is. I am heartbroken and sad. And I am so tired of being heartbroken and sad.