I love a plan. I love knowing what I’m going to do – not forever, not for all time, but what’s coming up. Maybe over the next few months, working towards something or things over a couple of years. (Book writing takes me years.)

Now my plans are all changed. My yoga teacher training has finished and the only thing left is the (formality in many ways) of our final exam. But we don’t know when we can do our final exam. It’s all on hold. I’ve been loving my psychotherapy training, for now we are moving to online, and it can work – but it’s definitely not the same. We’ve been working for months towards Fun Palaces‘ launch of our new website (also in Welsh!), new film, new evaluation … and we launched and it was small and quiet because we couldn’t take 20 people to Inverness as we’d been working towards for a year and our invitation to people is very different now that we don’t quite know what coming together as a community means.

And so much else. Other plans about seeing people and connecting and teaching my first yoga-and-breast cancer one-to-ones, running the first yoga-and-writing workshops. I love the variety of everything I do and I am learning – and I have loved knowing there are plans within this variety. Aims, goals, things to work towards.

That’s all different now. It’s changed. Friends have lost work that has taken them years to create, just cancelled. I’m fearful for the health and well-being of loved ones – and for my own health, decades of bronchitis and post-cancers stuff. Shelley and I have both had to cancel work or had it cancelled. All change.

And I realised I was trying to push away the feelings of upset, of sadness, worry, fear. I was already trying to jump to coping and getting on and being useful and making a difference and being brave and strong and OK.

I do want to be these things. I believe Fun Palaces (and yoga and therapy) can all support with these things. I think these positive qualities are really useful and we’re all going to need them, in service of others as well as ourselves.

AND it’s OK to be down first. It’s OK to be worried and upset and uncertain and fearful. It’s fine to find change difficult, to worry about what’s coming, to find uncertainty tough. It’s honest. Unless we allow ourselves to feel the difficulties we feel, we can’t fully support those who are most vulnerable. Unless those of us who are finding this hard admit it is hard, we will not be able to move through the hard to somewhere more like acknowledgement, acceptance even. A place from which to move forward.

So today I’ve been hating all this. All the hard and the change and the fear. I’ve felt exhausted and irritable and gritty and grumpy and frustrated and fearful and worried. I haven’t enjoyed any of these feelings, but I think that letting them be might make it a bit easier to get on tomorrow.

And I do want to get on tomorrow. (Or the day after.) See you there.