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Only Now

Julie Borden
4 min readAug 10, 2021

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Photo by nasro azaizia on Unsplash

How have I changed in the past year? It’s actually more a matter of how I’ve changed over the past several years. But I truly did not realize the full impact, how I had been changed down to my core, until 2020. It had to do with Covid, uncertainty, the election in November. I have no desire to write about politics, so this isn’t that.… Let’s just say I was concerned about how the election would turn out. And concerned about whether life would ever be the same, who was going to live, who was going to die, if kids were ever going to see their friends again or forever live in isolated pods on Zoom, and what about the economy? I would describe myself as an anxious person, and 2020 gave us plenty to be anxious about. But when asked at the end of October how I was doing with all the uncertainty (in this case, the topic was the election) I reflected…

Looking on any kind of “bright side”, I realized today that living during this crazy time has increased my capacity to live in the present moment. It has been a process for me to begin to comprehend what that even means. I would say most people would agree that living in the present is a good idea. Not that everyone is able to successfully do it, but there would probably be consensus that, of course, that’s what a person should do, ideally. I was not one of them. I might have said I agreed. No one wants to say, “Come on, seriously, living in the past and the future is the way to go…

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Julie Borden
Julie Borden

Written by Julie Borden

Social worker, therapist, reader, writer, head-in-the-clouds dreamer, awed by most everything. (She/her) Reach me at JulieBordenLCSW@gmail.com.

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