Heroes Not Zombies

I took this photo at a reservoir in the south of France one January and looking at it again today I thought of the title “stairway to the deeps” because as I contemplated the image my gaze moved down the steps into the water.

I must say this pandemic has, at times, felt like a descent to the depths. It’s felt like being submerged, surrounded by uncertainty, living with threats and restrictions, a slide down into obscurity. It can still feel like that.

However every staircase exists to enable travel in two directions, so you can look at this the other way and see an emergence. It’s possible to see those dimly visible steps as the first glimpse of improvement. Soon we will climb up and step clear of the waters.

It’s also easy to see this image as a metaphor…a stairway connecting our unconscious to our conscious mind.

What with all the social distancing there’s been a lot of isolation which has produced both periods of sadness but also, for many, opportunities to reflect and reconsider values and goals. For some that’s thrown them into higher level states of anxiety or chronic despair, but, hopefully the re-evaluations are leading to some positive life changes – changes in work patterns, changes to where someone lives (I’m thinking here of how many have not gone back to the jobs they had, how many have sold their city dwellings to go live in smaller towns or in the country, and so on)

The truth is polarities and opposites are at the heart of reality. Life is never “only this” or “only that”.

We’re up and down that bloody staircase a million times a day! Or so it can seem.

Well Life is movement. That’s it’s nature. And every descent will be accompanied by an ascent. Which brings me to my final point. The staircase itself is beautiful and it’s the moving up and down that is our everyday life.

I guess we’re all trying to find a rhythm that works for each of us.