Lake Okanagan is ice free. 

The geese are floating gracefully again over its surface. 

Vernon continues with its plan to spend an outrageous amount of money to kill a few of them. Although the number has been increased from 150 to 250 it still strikes me as wasteful in every respect. 

On Friday I had my third appointment with the physiotherapist since November 26. I intended to make it the last because $80.00 a visit seemed steep; I don't have any health plan beyond the provincial one. Also the pain had certainly diminished but not gone away, and I was beginning to think that after three months the same would have been the case even without physiotherapy. I entered the office for this last appointment intending to carry on doing the exercises I had been given and going on ever longer walks. But as Monty Python said, "No one expects the Spanish Inquisition."  And that's exactly what I got from Carey. His explanation of how bones heal laid bare my uninformed assumptions, his outline of new exercises and his unexpected use of needles in my muscles combined with the fact that this time the fee was only $75.00 crushed every aspect of my argument against continuing. I am booked for another appointment in early April. 

I don't know if it's the pandemic, ageing, living alone, recovering from injury or an ultimate submission to the unrelenting media exposure to Covid, Covid , Covid with its contemporary tendency to dwell on individual emotional and psychological reactions to this overwhelming external reality, but I have never been so conscious of and spent so much time on my own physical, mental and emotional needs, wants or whatever. It's crept up on me slowly. At first I fought it, thinking this attention to self was unnecessary and self indulgent. But as I don't have much else to occupy my time I carry on doing physio exercises with intention, walking ever longer routes, cutting my hair with unwarranted care, applying cream to face and body, making changes in my wardrobe and home decor that I would never have even deemed necessary before, hovering over house plants, writing and reading and all manner of self centred pastimes. 

My newly reorganized sun room

I'm beginning to think that the importance attached to self care these days is often warranted because the stresses placed on family and work life in this uncertain time of pandemic must sometimes feel insurmountable for younger people. I suffer little of that, but old age no matter the historical period makes its demands on the body, mind and spirit. And maybe at its best caring for the self makes a person more aware of the necessity of care itself and hence of the need to help others whose cares are much greater than our own. 

The pandemic is forcing Canadians of my generation and following to question the delusion of control over our personal destinies that some of us have basked in during 75 years of peace and prosperity. We are now facing uncertainty as never before in our time. But people through the ages have had their complacency ruffled. Plague, drought, flood, famine, corrupt governments and wars have regularly forced human beings to rework their systems, to return to struggling together against the odds and even to endure mass migration. Now it's our time to be compelled to accept the tenuousness of our situation. Perhaps we will even learn to appreciate the much more dire case faced by millions of people around the world and do whatever we can to promote greater equality and more sustainable sources of energy at home and everywhere. I'm thinking again about Rutger Bregman and how influenced I was by his books, Utopia for Realistsand Humankind. I probably wouldn't have read either of them if it had not been for lockdown which has made me pay more attention to many things that I  previously would have thought I didn't have time for. What did I have time for?

There's always time fora laugh. An old poster on the wall of a coffee shop in Lake Country. We went there after a walk on the rail trail.