I’m starting off strong here and staying true to my word by making today’s entry in the snow/prison diary in which I plan to document this current period of winter confinement. While I hope that this will be a two-day thing, I suspect it’ll be a significantly longer-term project. Watch me curse myself weeks from now when these posts devolve into some version of “yep, still stuck inside” and the wall above my desk is full of tally marks I’ve scratched there in groups of five.
But that’s a problem for later. For the time being, I’m firmly in the calm, content, and optimistic phase, and I’d rather live in the cozy, entirely manageable present than in a hypothetical future that’s yet to come.
Yesterday was the day of the storm. I was frenetically busy with one plan after another, interrupted and distracted only by my taking hourly pictures of the snow accumulating on our balcony and periodically (OK, frequently) Googling “storm update Toronto.” It was was wild to see it coming down and piling up; awe-inspiring, really. Predictions were revised several times to increase the total snowfall, and school was cancelled for today by the time the night was over. This was the moment I realized that this was a storm for the books: Toronto school boards very, very rarely call a snow day, and when they do, they usually make the announcement at 6:00 AM the morning of.
Mid-afternoon, it occurred to me that I should be panicking. After all, every additional cm is an additional cm that’ll need to be cleared from the sidewalk before I can resume normal activities. At a certain point, though, it seemed wise to just lean into and accept it. I imagine that there was a similar psychological phenomenon at work when a former student of mine knew he was going to fail a test and so spent the designated period drawing a detailed picture of a dragon in his exam booklet rather than bothering to hazard guesses to any but the first two questions. Might as well accept reality and make the most of what you have—in my case, “found” time to focus on writing and sewing; in his, “found” time to focus on the artful depiction of mythical beasts.
From then on, radical acceptance all the way. It’s much easier at this stage, when everyone’s in the same boat. In some ways, this kind of thing brings out the best in people: neighbours helping neighbours, child-like wonder, communal commiseration. It’s novel and, yes, exciting. I went to bed looking forward to the first of many snow days and woke up kind of pumped and confident in my ability to cope with the aftermath of a record-breaking storm so impressive that it warranted an article in The Guardian (one of my five papers of choice —yeah, I need to cultivate more responsible news-consumption practices).
If you think about it, interminable hospitalizations in years past were bootcamp-level training that makes me uniquely qualified to handle this. Comparatively speaking, physical isolation from the world outside—not the all-encompassing, morale-crushing isolation I experienced back then—is nothing. Indeed, it’s been another frenetically busy day with plenty of meaningful interactions, and the days ahead promise to be similarly full. If anything, I intend to slow it down a little and settle into a sustainable routine that includes, you know, all that writing and sewing I keep swearing I’m going to do.
Back to it.
De Morbo Sacro: Life and/with Epilepsy 