18 March 2020 – We are all adapting — in large ways, but also small. Small shifts in everyday activity, or how we perceive an activity, in this new context.
I am walking north on Willow Street, and that is already an adaptation. I had planned to be strolling the magical grounds of the VanDusen Botanical Garden. But I’m not.
Why not? Got to the Gardens, and found it closed. Just 10 minutes earlier, the slightly unnerved young staffer told me, word had come down to close the doors. Duration unknown, but effective immediately.
So I adapt, and exchange their 22 Ha for a 6-ish km walk home instead. Same sunshine and fresh air, and lots of residential-street shrubs and trees. (Albeit minus helpful botanical labelling.)
Second adaptation. If public venues are closing, I think, maybe the library system will be next. I am a junkie, about to be cut off from her usual source. Alternate source? Little Free Library boxes — that amazing book-sharing resource now totalling some 100,000 boxes worldwide.
I swear, the thought has no sooner crossed my mind than a LFL box pops in view.
Complete with cheerful spring flowers, did you notice?
I take two books.
I promise to keep my end of the bargain.
I walk on.
And I meet, some kilometres farther north/east, a call for another adaptation, this one chalked on the sidewalk at a street corner.
Perhaps not a change of behaviour, at that.
Perhaps it’s what you do anyway.
Now is sure the time for it!
