“I’ve been having the best time, you know, being me.” – Dionne Warwick
I love watching SNL clips on You Tube. I don’t usually stay up late enough to watch SNL live, so I have to wait for the clips. I watched a great clip where the SNL players were pretending to be on a “Dionne Warwick Talk Show.” Dionne, the legendary singer, turned 80 the other day, and that was SNL’s way to celebrate with her. Apparently, Dionne Warwick has been enjoying a new kind of fame, as of late, with a younger crowd. She has been tweeting (Twitter) some crazy, funny tweets about younger performers. And she has been getting some new found attention for it; she is often dubbed “The Queen of Twitter”. When asked about this attention, Ms. Warwick says:
“I find it quite amusing.”
I watched an interview with Dionne Warwick, by Denny Directo, from the TV show Entertainment Tonight. It was one of the most positive, uplifting interviews which I have seen in a while. Ms. Warwick was performing in Las Vegas when the coronavirus came and shut everything down. She was sent home, to hunker down. This is what she said about that:
“I got to know my home, sleep in my own bed, make my own meals when I wanted them, how I wanted them. I’ve been having the best time, you know, being me.”
So simple. So pure. So healthy. There is a lot of times during coronavirus that we all dwelled on what we were missing out on, and what has been lost. And it is certainly healthy to grieve and mourn what this terrible pandemic has wrought on all of us. Some of us have even experienced the greatest losses of our lives, and those terrible losses need to be grieved. But at the same time, the coronavirus situation has, in many ways, forced us to get reacquainted with ourselves. By realizing what we miss and what we don’t miss, we understand our priorities better. By having to spend more times with just ourselves, we got to explore what really makes each of us tick. Sometimes this is an uncomfortable process. Sometimes being forced to really be with yourself, makes you face what you don’t like about yourself. But that’s okay, too. There are lessons of humility and acceptance and compassion, in that experience. And when we soak in those kinds of lessons, we then are better able to extend acceptance and compassion and kindness towards others.
Thankfully, the vaccine is here and it is giving us all hope that our “normal” lives are right around the corner. But in these next few months, maybe making sure that we have a loving relationship with ourselves, before we head out into the freed up world, again, is the way to go. Maybe if we all fall into the ease of “having the best time, you know, being me“, the after-pandemic world will be a whole new world, the likes of which we have never seen, filled with acceptance, compassion, humility and awe. Maybe if we spend some time, in these last few months of socially distanced living, giving complete unconditional understanding, and comfort, and love to ourselves, we will be able to better know how to extend that Love outwards into the world, which so sorely, sorely needs it. I have hopes that not only is “normal” right around the bend, but this “normal” will be brighter, kinder, more interesting, deeper, and more authentic, than we have ever experienced “normal” before. I can’t wait to see what it looks like and feels like! It’s going to be amazing.
“someday we will forget the hardship, and the pain its caused us; we will realise, hurt is not the end. lessons appear to teach us strength, we learn happiness is an inside job and to cure our insanity we must not fear what is to come, but believe in what we’ve been taught.”
― Nikki Rowe
“God gave us a variety of ways to get hurt out and do it clean. Blood cleans a wound. Tears clean a different kind of wound. You might not like it, Frannie, but you shouldn’t stop yourself from doing it. Clean the wound so it can heal. Then move on.”
― Kristen Ashley