Searching for Serenity
It all begins with an idea.
Like just about everyone I’m struggling to adjust to the current pandemic and all of its implications. I tell myself this is only temporary. I’m a glass-half-full kind of girl and I hope I always will be, but in this case it feels like someone keeps sneaking sips out of my glass. Temporary, but for how long? I need answers and no one has them. I also need to get a serenity post out this month of all months because I know we’re all searching for some calm and peacefulness. I saw a post from a millennial—I’ve forgotten where—that made me smile and helped put things in perspective. “Our grandparents were asked to go to war. All they’re asking us to do is sit on a couch!”
I look for something to occupy my mind—something other than the coronavirus and its ripple effects. I settle on photographing an old coffee mill, the one my mother remembers her mother using as she was growing up. The rippled tin in the background came from the roof of an old barn on the farm where my dad grew up and where I happily played with my cousins. I choose these things because they remind me of family. I’m missing our kids and our grandkids and my mom, who is currently confined to her room with no visitors allowed in a memory care unit. She has absolutely no understanding of what is going on.
I try to remember how much my parents and grandparents had to cope with through the years, things totally out of their control and so much scarier than what we’re experiencing now. Two World Wars. The Spanish Flu. The Great Depression. The Dust Bowl. Polio. Those things had to be frightening beyond belief when you have no idea how things will come out.
“Everything will be okay in the end. If it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”
That is one of my favorite quotes because I find it to be true literally 100% of the time. But I have to google it to find out who originally said it and am surprised to learn that it was John Lennon, a hero of mine. It all fits. John met an untimely end, but he’s still with us in so many ways. It’s okay.
For more thoughts on serenity be sure to check out Ohio photographer Eileen Critchley.