Things have come to a halt, I’m sure you have noticed. And while this is devastating on so many levels, people are dying and others can’t support themselves anymore, there’s also a quiet beauty in everything slowing down. Sarah and I are both home with our son Ellis and the first few days were rough, we were all climbing on each other and with panic in our eyes we asked ourselves how long we could endure this time…together.
Yesterday we took a long walk, spring is here and it doesn’t wait for anyone, the world is moving forward without panic, it has no agenda. Slowly it’s rubbing off on us. We’re scared, but things will be ok. Somehow. We’re changing. We have stocked up on food, we’re getting used to the new pace, it feels like a reset in many ways. We’re starting over again – together – and that’s a gift no one had expected.
Whether you’re in the wedding industry or planning your own wedding, we’ll get through this.
Life finds a way.
“In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”
In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.
This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.”
– CS Lewis, 1948
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