I want to go somewhere. Anywhere. Road trip. Plane trip. Day trip. Weekend trip. Anything.
The funny thing, I’m not a big traveller. Growing up, my parents took us on occasional road trips — sitting in the backseat of the car with my sisters, playing magnetic checkers, reading books, complaining about the wait. We were not wealthy, so these short day trips were a treat.
A chance to see something different. To temporarily step away from our daily reality of work, stress, study and chores to … something that was joyful. Fun.
So a friend and I began planning for a weekend getaway. We thought: road trip and debated Vermont. We thought: plane trip and looked at pictures of Arizona.
Halton Hills is gorgeous. Snow-covered Halton Hills is even more so. But I yearned for something unfamiliar… mountains, desert, maybe ocean. Something so intense, so majestic that it would — for that moment — sweep everything else from my mind.
And as we planned, another kind of reality sunk in. How do we navigate the new rules of quarantine? How do we sort out work issues? What if the COVID variants require another lockdown? A simple weekend trip all of a sudden became a bigger discussion of coverage at the hospital where I work, the nursing home where she works, at the clinics where we both work, and contingency plans for all three as well as our responsibilities to our families.
We stopped.
And a part of me grieved.
The grief wasn’t just about a trip. It’s the complexity of our daily interactions now as we navigate lockdowns and quarantine and day to day restrictions on our freedoms.
I miss parts of the world as it was. And I recognize my privilege and that hard as my life is, it’s not as hard as it is for many others out there. This pandemic has highlighted profound societal issues of equity.
But I miss how simple some things were.
So for now, I dream. And hope that as we come out of the pandemic, as vaccines are rolled out, as we learn a new normal — we will end up somewhere more joyful.