Beauty 365 … Stories of Love and Life for Everyday

Groundhog day!! Again!!

For those of you who need an explanation, Groundhog Day is a holiday celebrated in the US and Canada, where a crowd of on-lookers watch a groundhog, also known as a woodchuck, predict when spring will arrive. The expression became famous with the Hollywood blockbuster comedy Groundhog Day, in which Bill Murray plays an unpleasant TV weather presenter who is sent to do a "soft news" item about Groundhog Day for the fourth year in a row. He becomes trapped, re-living February 2 over and over again until he learns from his mistakes.

These days, do you have the impression that every day is “groundhog day”?

In my life before lock-down, certain events occurred on certain days, giving each day a flavour and routine of its own. For example, before, Mondays meant planning the week ahead, visiting my dad, grocery shopping, and catching up on the housework that didn’t get done over the weekend. Tuesday meant reading at morning Mass, visiting my Mummy Mentor clients or working on my school presentations, back and forth trips to footy training and evening sharing group. I won’t bore you with the whole week’s movements, but I think you get the picture.

These lock-down days, every day feels the same. “What day is it again?”, I have heard the children ask so many times now. Each day seems to involve the same things: a lot of eating, sitting around the table and talking for extended periods, probably a walk, a quick trip to the shops, maybe some table tennis, board games, a movie, periods of work/study on lap tops… and so it goes.

Day 11 was a Sunday, so in our effort to “keep holy the Sabbath”, we tried to spice things up a bit. We began with a special breakfast of pancakes and Nutella, generously prepared by our sixteen-year-old. We all dressed up (i.e. got out of our pyjamas) and watched an online mass. (Thank you, Fr. Dan from St. Benedict’s, Burwood, you are amazing!!) The Phillip Island Bakery jam doughnuts followed, elevating the celebration to the next level. (Do stay tuned for an upcoming blog that will be entitled, “Stacking on the kilos”!!) We put aside work and studies for the day and generally tried, at the invitation of Fr. Dan, to be more consciously aware of God’s presence in everything.