{"id":312,"date":"2020-07-12T15:20:47","date_gmt":"2020-07-12T15:20:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/?p=312"},"modified":"2020-07-14T20:24:23","modified_gmt":"2020-07-14T20:24:23","slug":"what-do-you-call-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/2020\/07\/12\/what-do-you-call-it\/","title":{"rendered":"What do YOU call it?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Boredom in Isolation?<\/em><\/strong> by Barbara Helvey Hughes, March 22, 2020
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It was long and long ago and I was sheltered from the Indiana summer heat by the long straight line of Lombardy poplars stretched across the back of our yard.\u00a0 I might have been eight or nine years old ~ if I close my eyes I still see my younger self slumped against that thin tall trunk, stripping bark from a fallen twig, chewing on a sweet blade of grass and gazing into the cloudless electric blue sky.\u00a0 It\u2019s odd what we remember but that is a memory, forever etched into my Hall of Memories.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because that day I said this to my brother: There\u2019s nothing to do. Where IS everybody?! I\u2019m SO BORED!!! \u00a0My late brother, Ron, sat in a heavy wood and metal wheelchair shaded by the overgrown hedge at the side of the yard, chuckling and shaking his head, rather disgustedly if truth be told.
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Ron was struck by a deadly virus when he was six years old \u2013 polio.\u00a0 Something we can\u2019t even see.\u00a0 He held the distinction of being one of the worst cases.\u00a0 Many of the kids who contracted polio came through it and could walk, some with short braces or a limp, but Ron was completely confined to his prison chair, during most of those developmental years.\u00a0 It always reminded me of a prisoner\u2019s electric chair ~ forebodingly cruel, especially to a young and what should have been, active, boy.\u00a0
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What?! I irritatingly asked as he looked away from me.\u00a0 He didn\u2019t, or couldn\u2019t, speak for a few seconds, then he looked up and narrowed his eyes as he gulped between words. \u00a0Barb, you have no idea what boredom is.\u00a0 Try sitting in this chair from the moment you get up and until the moment you\u2019re put back in bed.\u00a0 Try not being able to go to the bathroom or walk to the door or get a drink unless someone helps you.\u00a0 Try having an operation every single summer of your life and STILL not be able to move without help.\u00a0 Not even be able to grab a book or look out a window because you can\u2019t really move anywhere by yourself ~ everything I want or need is out of reach or out of the way.\u00a0 Yeah, try that, then tell me how bored you are and how there\u2019s nothing to do\u2026Ron taught me at an early age that virtually everything is about one\u2019s unique perspective.
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My brother was always such an amazing teacher for me.\u00a0 He was my Hero and I have to say it was Ron, who taught me Compassion and Empathy and to whatever degree I have evolved into it, Kindness and by that extension ~ Love. From the day he got polio and was placed in an iron lung until the day he died, in November 2018, he never took one single step on his own and without the help of heavy steel braces and, yet, he lived his life with little or no complaints, he went to school, to work and when he retired he ran research projects on his computers and helped many, many people along their own path, including me.\u00a0
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I am grateful he will not be enduring the challenges of this pandemic.\u00a0 Truly, he travelled through more than enough challenges during his life.
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We ~ you and I, face weeks if not months, of isolation ahead of us because of a virus. \u00a0Something we can\u2019t even see. \u00a0It will kill many of us and disable even more.\u00a0 It will cause economic terror and destruction of lives on all levels.\u00a0 It will evolve, possibly, into the stuff of our worst nightmares and those movies we don\u2019t want to watch ~ disaster\/horror\/terror\/futuristic. \u00a0But, we WILL watch as real life unravels before our eyes and we wonder why we were so complacent when it began.
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Yet, if we are wise, and I believe we are; if we are kind, Loving and compassionate and I believe most of us are; and if we have Faith in ourselves and in one another (and this kind of Truth generally appears most vividly during \u00a0catastrophic circumstances) and I ABSOLUTELY believe we do ~ we will also watch as we join and pull together, we let go of \u2018self\u2019 and embrace the entirety of all of us, we will do what\u2019s right for all, rather than selfishly what we want or feel we \u2018deserve\u2019.\u00a0
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We will, undoubtedly, whine, complain, bitch and moan about our lives. We may try to thwart safe action and go out.\u00a0 Many might become angry, engage in violence against those we Love, become depressed or despondent, asking: \u00a0Why are we in forced isolation? What do they expect us to do? How can we live under these conditions?\u00a0 We are FREE and we NEED to be able to go out, to earn a living and pay our bills, to socialize, to play, to have fun, to mingle, to interact, to, to, to\u2026\u2026.me, me, me!!!
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Yes, there are those narcissists, those centered in huge egos, those who think the rules\/requirements don\u2019t pertain to them and they will be found out.\u00a0 They will, eventually, punish themselves or be punished by others, when it didn\u2019t have to happen: when they, too, could have assisted rather than thinking only of themselves.
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But those few simply won\u2019t matter in the long run and in the larger picture. What WILL matter is that WE stood together, WE helped one another as best we could and even if it only meant we stayed inside, WE were there for those who needed the comfort of our prayers, our gentle and Loving thoughts: our encouragement.\u00a0
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In isolation we need never become bored: we can share our Love and Hope and ultimately, what will matter is that WE will awaken and understand how deeply we have harmed our very home and WE will join together and take action to limit that harm in the future, knowing if we do not, there will be a very different future awaiting us.
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WE will LEARN from this situation and WE will begin the process of BECOMING\u2026.more Loving, more Aware, more thoughtful, more affirmative, more connected to not only one another regardless of where we live, but to our Beloved Earth, who provides a home for ALL of us.
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To every cloud there is a silver lining.
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Boredom is simply thinking too much about ourselves.
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We need never be bored, even in isolation.
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For me and Peter, we are writing, editing, planning, gathering material for books, organizing, reaching out, cleaning, cooking, laughing, thinking, having discussions, talking with those we Love and doing our best to BE here for them and for one another.\u00a0 This just might be looked back upon as a singularly momentous time. \u00a0Precious.
Bored? Not likely\u2026.
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Love is the language spoken here.
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\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What IS ‘boredom’ if not “thinking too much about ourselves and not enough about others”?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":314,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-312","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-essays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=312"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":315,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/312\/revisions\/315"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/314"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=312"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=312"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hughesgallery.net\/barbarahelveyhughes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=312"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}