Excuses, Covid excuses

The past two years had seen huge progress down on the działka; this year - nothing, no progress, other than starting up the motorbikes and doing some cursory scything. Everything's put on hold - summoning the geodeta (official surveyor) to mark out the eastern boundary of my plot, then getting the builders in to put up a new fence along that boundary and to close off the southern boundary, then to get rid of the fencing between my two plots and make them one. The builders are playing hard to get; no one wants to commit right now.

I guess for many work-wise, the Covid excuse for stasis is pervasive; some business goals are for obvious reasons entirely unattainable, some have only a chance of being 90% achieved. 

Globally, we are still many months from getting the risk down to negligible levels, with the ever-present risk of a second, more deadly, wave this winter. Here in Poland, the last week saw the largest number of new infections since the start of the pandemic, and the death toll, which had fallen back the previous week, rose to reach the fourth-highest weekly total. It is too early to be complacent. On the train back from my działka today, there were far more people travelling towards Warsaw (all but one, I must add, in a mask).

I don't feel confident enough yet to push the boat out on more investment on the działka. I was planning to get a local landscape gardener in to discuss beautifying the plot, that it might bring even more delight to the eye than in its current, rather wild, form. Right now, I'd consider such spending rash; who knows how things will turn out. 

"Fortune favours the bold" goes the saying, but I'd rather err on the side of caution.

Or is this just my Covid excuse?

I honestly don't know. I found the first few weeks greatly conducive to my creativity - I maintained my Lenten resolution to write every day, and this resulted in a large leap in my understanding of my own spirituality. That had been the aim, so goal attained. My aim for this summer - to spend time exploring rural Poland on my motorbikes - has stalled. I feel that any activity that carries a risk of hospitalisation, however slight, should be put on hold until the situation within Poland's health service has become safer.

So for now - it's about marking time. Reading is always a useful pursuit. Just before lockdown, my daughter, my brother and my good friend Jonathan Wood all independently of each other all mentioned Joseph Campbell to me. Campbell was the author of The Hero with a Thousand Faces and A Skeleton Key to Finnegan's Wake, which then opens the door to James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake itself. With Wikipedia, doors fly open unexpectedly, I can spend hours just wandering aimlessly across articles, broadening my knowledge.

But then what? What should I have learnt? I think that Joseph Campbell's monomyth ties in with the narratives we are constantly constructing and re-constructing about ourselves; self-justification on the go (something that's glaringly obvious in the case of that arch-narcissist, Trump). We colourise, glamorise, and airbrush the inconvenient out of our lives. We humans have always sought a good story, since prehistory. Campbell understood this, Tolkien understood this, the authors of the Bible understood this. In the context of the myth, we want a good myth about ourselves. These days, social media feeds on that desire. Implicitly, we all mythologise about ourselves. "Print the legend".

Covid-19 and the lockdown has thrown a spanner into to the works of most people's life stories, especially the younger generation, as they set out their own place in the world. We will have to re-weave our personal narratives - why something didn't work out when it should have, or why the lockdown was a lucky break for one reason or another, why we achieved a unexpected result, or found a goal in a different way.

Striving to drop the ego is one way of dealing with this - more on this topic to come.

Meanwhile, the construction sector in Poland is not handing out excuses, they are getting on with it. Both the S7 extension and the Warsaw-Radom railway line modernisation are running way behind schedule, but work is going on, which is reassuring. Work in the open air carries less risk than office work in the city centre.

Chynów station; waiting for the new 'up' line.

Ah - and more one lockdown thing from me - exercise. Keep banging away at the press-ups, pull-ups, planks, weights, sit-ups and paces. Eat masses of fresh fruit and veg, and watch the alcohol intake!

This time two years ago:

The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli reviewed

This time three years ago:
The fossil-fuel powered car is dead

This time five years ago:
With Blood and Scars by B.E. Andre - book review

This time six years ago:
We can all take photos like Vivian Maier - can't we? 

This time seven years ago:
Ethereal and transient

This time eight years ago:
Wrocław railway station before the Euro football championships

This time nine years ago: 
By tram to Boernerowo

This time 11 years ago:
Food-Industrial Shop; rural USA or Poland

This time 13 years ago:
Twilight time, Jeziorki