Then there’s my 2020 New Year’s Resolution: to try to pace myself. 

Cue the laughter in the second month in lockdown. But the funny thing is, it’s still a problem, even though the reasons are profoundly different. 

I made my resolution after taking on too many commitments over the past year or two. Maybe three. Arguably five. And eventually finding myself swamped.

Saying yes to pretty much everything was a conscious decision. With my husband’s MS progressing, we had to cut down on the amount of travelling we did. Then we weren’t able to travel together at all. Nor could I take off myself without having someone in the house to help while I was gone, and I didn’t feel right asking people too often. Even in the city, life grew less spontaneous as my husband couldn’t get up those two steps into that good-looking restaurant, and most stores proved inaccessible for casual browsing. 

Legally, music and sports venues, theatres and other public spaces have to be accessible, but the tickets for disabled seating can sell out fast. Then there’s the problem of getting into many friends’ houses. By “problem,” I mean “impossibility.” This was, and remains, terribly difficult for my husband. 

Myself, I reacted by starting to say yes to pretty much everything I could do on my own. 

By the end of last summer, I looked in my schedule and found I’d agreed to take part in two fundraising runs and a fundraising hockey tournament within three months. On their own, the tournament and runs (in my case, fast walks) all proved to be both fun and manageable. 

But… fundraising. At a certain point, you’re asking too much of your friends.  

There was also the way I ended up triple-booking myself during book-launch season, running from one reading to another in time to kiss cheeks and buy books I didn’t have time to read. After which I’d get home at 10 p.m. and sit down at my desk to write notes on someone’s script or novel that I’d promised to help with.

That’s just a random part of what I’d agreed to, and it leaves out my own writing, my part-time teaching job, regular exercise, shopping, cooking, laundry, changing the cat litter. (Sorry, Archie, for the times it got a little unchanged). 

And of course, I was far from alone. The usual answer to, How are you?

Oh, I’m so busy.

Which, of course, was a boast. Self-justification. And endemic. 

Therefore, my 2020 resolution: Learn to pace myself. Say No.

Naturally, our hot water tank sprung a leak in early January, the washing machine shorted out, the dryer developed a bad cough, and I ran around buying new appliances, after which I had to find ways for the balky delivery guys to get them down the narrow basement stairs—thanks to my brother for taking off the trim—then forgot my resolution while spending most of my spare time for a month (or two) painting the laundry room all purty for our glossy new appliances, not to mention the basement stairway, why not the rest of the basement…

Insane. 

Then I got sick at the tag end of February, maybe with the flu. Judging from symptoms I’ve read about since, I’ve begun to suspect it might have been COVID, but antibody tests aren’t available, and no one knows if you end up immune to the virus anyway, so I still have to be immensely careful about going out, given my husband’s health. 

In other words, I’m spending most of my time inside. And how easy–right?–to pace yourself when there isn’t as much to do.

Maybe not. 

I don’t think I’m alone. So many friends e-mail/text/Zoom/call about how distracted they feel. Work and chores take too long as they find their minds wandering, or as they catch themselves doing unnecessary tasks. Tidy, straighten, bake bake bake. Luckily I’m living in yoga pants, they say, given all that baking. We finished a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle we got ten years ago, even though I should have been…

It’s stress, of course. We need to—I need to—figure out a sane new pace, working just enough, keeping on top of chores instead of letting them get on top of me, enjoying that 5 p.m. drink on the front porch when it’s a sunny day like today. 

Instead hours can mizzle by like mist.

One thing I’ve been thinking about (distractedly) is the Victory Gardens people grew during World War Two. I’ve always thought of them straightforwardly as ways for people to grow food in the face of wartime scarcity.

Now I realize that part of it involved working off stress. 

My uncle was a navigator in the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War who flew missions out of India. His plane was shot down over northern Thailand and he spent 22 months in a prisoner-of-war camp. My mother was his younger sister, and only now, so many years later, do I begin to grasp something of the distraction she must have felt even before her brother shipped overseas.

I don’t like to compare this pandemic to war. But we’re all under stress, and Step One is acknowledging that. 

Step Two, for me, is saying once again that I’ve got to try to find a sane pace. To be kind to myself, and at the same time, to try not to get too distracted. To use the quiet time wisely. 

And have that drink.