Did you ever play Stuck in The Mud when you were younger? It’s basically a game of tag. One player’s ‘it’ and everyone else scatters to evade capture, squealing, if that’s your thing. If you are captured though you become ‘stuck in the mud’ and you can’t move. You have to stand still with your legs and arms apart, like a frozen star jump, and wait for someone who isn’t stuck in the mud to free you by crawling through your legs. It’s a fine, fine game.
Right now it feels like there’s a lot of us stuck in the mud while Covid runs amuck making us squeal, if that’s your thing.
And getting tagged, getting stuck, sucks.
Especially at this time of year, when we’re so used to running free with our friends and family, especially if it now means spending this time alone, feeling lonely.
None of us wants that. No one wants to be stuck.
But getting stuck at some point, it seems, is inevitable.
And when we do, rather than stand with legs akimbo and arms apart (which, when you picture it is a posture powerful in full acceptance of the moment and all openness to possibility) we might want to curl up into a closed ball (for comfort, protection and maybe self-pity). Which is entirely understandable. I’ve been in a form of stuck-ness for a while now with my health and I’ve wanted to spend most of it curled up, metaphorically.
But there comes a time, sooner or later, when the curled-up ball of comfort and protection actually becomes a kind of self-denial. It prevents the incoming possibilities of future and change.
Historically, pandemics and plagues have always ended so there’s no reason to think it’ll be different this time. Yes, currently things are shit, Christmas is cancelled and so on, but right now we’re just stuck in the mud. And at some point someone will be along to crawl through our legs to unstick us.
So come, stand big and tall, legs apart and arms raised and wait patiently for the crawling liberator to come.
I wish a peaceful, or at least passable, Solstice, Christmas and Stuck in The Mudmas to everyone.
Love, Jake xx
