OPTIMISM

The first day over the hump. Day 16.

Honestly, this is one of those days where I am really not sure what I am going to write. But I’m sticking with this exercise and braving the blank page in front of me, trusting something will come. It’s coming.

Looking to the day ahead, I have another Heard Over The Piano interview tonight for CAIC. So I need to prepare some questions for that, as well as set up the video and audio tech that it requires. Lately, I’ve been trying to use my new camera as a webcam for these interviews, and it is supposed to work, but so far it always seems to crash Zoom at some point during the chats. It’s a frustrating thing, and each time it happens, it makes me so excited for a return to “normalcy”.

Checking in with people in my life, it sounds as though everyone I know is grappling with the fast approaching one year anniversary of the US lockdown. For us in San Francisco, we’re only about 9 or 10 days away from that milestone. The past twelve months have been emotionally exhausting, and it feels like our mental health is fraying at the edges, if not worse. 

And yet, hope is on the horizon. Listening to the New York Times’ Daily podcast as I unloaded the dishwasher this morning, it was heartening to hear how effective all of these new vaccines are, as well as how vital it is for governments to get vaccines distributed in order to outpace the variants. In a way, it left me daring to feel a hint of optimism that such urgency would hold our political leaders accountable to their promises of getting most adults in the US vaccines over the course of the next few months. If they let us down, it sounds as though the dangers are significant that our fancy vaccines could be rendered useless, and this could drag on exponentially longer.

I’ve noticed that the past year has highlighted people’s natural tendencies in regards to positivity and negativity. It’s been interesting to note how some are so quick to throw a wet blanket on any fire of hope they are confronted with, as if it’s a competition and their need to catastrophize must vanquish any hint of optimism. Often, that doomsday negativity touts itself as realism, even though all reality contains both hope and danger and there is no real way to predict the future.

Unloading the dishwasher today, listening to my podcast, I was happy to note that the fire of my own optimism hasn’t been extinguished. Fingers crossed it’s right.