Slow. Go slow if you can.
Just for an hour or two. Even if you have to force yourself to do it.
And I don’t mean battering around the inside of your pandemic house.
I don’t care if you call it self-care or mindfulness or anything else. Slow down.
Just realize that this entire experience, as unique and jarring as it is, is probably messing with you in ways you haven’t even thought of.
Sure, most things are fine and there are few enough COVID-19 cases that maybe we don’t have to worry, today or tomorrow, about a potentially life-threatening illness. But plenty are drinking more, plenty more are sleeping less, and, if you’re like me, when you are sleeping, you often find yourself tangled up in colourful, complicated, confusing dreams, the sort of dreams that come from rough reconstructions of the shredded fragments of the rest of your life.
Maybe you’re fighting with family members — maybe you’re fighting with yourself, trying to push forwards through the thick treacle of “what’s any of it matter anyway?”
I do that almost every day, and then sag into bed, awash in lack of purpose.
And then sometimes, it breaks, and light shines in.
I was standing on the edge of a small pond, on rattling bog that was slowly sinking under my feet, the dark water deepening around my boots, the muck and ooze occasionally belching out bubbles of sulphurous rot-gas. To my right, an old beaver lodge, capped in green growth, and out in front of it, a denuded clutter of stripped branches, browse the beavers had brought for winter and then used. No sign of beavers, though.
Then the monster appeared. Not a big monster. But a monster nonetheless.
I was fishing, or at least, fishing as much as you can be fishing when your line’s lying flat and motionless on the water and you don’t really care if you catch anything, or even, for that matter, get a rise.
Thick warm air, very still, a heaviness to it that spoke of coming rain. Not now, but soon, and maybe very soon.
Then the monster appeared. Not a big monster. But a monster nonetheless.
It was right by my leg, and caught my eye as I checked my footing. I wish I’d looked sooner. What I saw was amazing enough, but a minute or so earlier?
What I saw was the last few moments of a new dragonfly unfolding from the now-useless hard shell that had been its exterior as a nymph. Dragonfly nymphs are true science-fiction alien beasts, if only you imagine them, say, human-sized, with their outsized appetites, unforgiving jaws and sharp mandibles. But here, all at once, was the long green counterbalancing tail, here, the crystalline, see-through clear panes of the wings. The strange-shaped, almost robotic eyes.
It clung to a stalk of water plant, heaving itself into shape while holding on as the branch swayed — at first more a wet-looking rejected version of itself, and then, suddenly, a working dragonfly.
It held its wings out to dry, and then, clinging and still staring with those big hard eyes, started to shake those wings. No, not shake them — vibrate them in place, quickly enough that their edges blurred. Little vibrating bursts of motion, the sort of thing that if you could hear it, would, I imagine, sound like humming.
I was, I have to admit, more than a little stunned. Rod tip down in the water, afraid to even reach for my phone to get a picture. Afraid to startle it and interrupt a process that moved far more quickly than I would have expected it to have.
A thing that had been was now another, very different thing, and on the plant stalk, the hard, no-longer needed shell that had been the dragon fly’s entire existence until now stayed behind, gripping as if life depended on it.
A true marvel.
Behind me, out of sight on the road, the sound of cars and trucks, the wail of an ambulance siren from Carbonear coming, arriving, leaving.
Everything was still the way it was when I walking to the edge of the pond. Same fears, same dread, same worry.
But also, somehow, it was better.
Slow down. Slow down and look around.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
