Keep Your Eye on the Road - Ciaran Murtagh

I don't have much to say this month, not because a lot hasn't happened - it has -  but because it feels like it's all been said by many people, in many ways, many times before. 

I feel like I'm in the midway through a trans Atlantic journey on some rickety old boat, no land in sight, just the knowledge that somewhere just beyond the horizon is the place I need to be. 

Days become weeks with precious little change and everybody seems to be in a holding pattern that started six weeks ago and is now getting harder to sustain. For a few weeks we could make do and scramble to regain a semblance of normality. We could work late, work early, home school, exercise with Joe Whoeverheis and keep the car on the road. Now we're six weeks in,  with no end in sight and starting to doubt the value of the car in the first place. 

It's at times like these that we have to remember why we set out in the first place. What it is we want to achieve - not in a 'I learned the lute in Covid' kind of way, in a much more profound, 'these are my values' and I hold them true regardless of the nonsense coming at me from all angles' kind of way. 

I'm taking comfort in music and - maybe because of the boat analogy, or the fact that we've just crossed some sort of Rubicon - it's The Waterboys who are really doing it for me.  This is the Sea sums up my feelings of where we are pretty well. 

You're trying to make sense

Of something that you just can't see

Trying to make sense now

And you know you once held the key

But that was the river

And this is the sea...

But as we drift out of our depth to who knows where, it's another Waterboys song that gives me hope. Keep keeping on and don't lose sight of what you hold dear. Know where you're going, be true to yourself and no matter what distractions, turbulence and nonsense lie ahead, trust that you'll get there eventually. Somehow. 

Keep the river on your right

And the highway at your shoulder

And the front line in your sights, pioneer