Sheltering In Place - Week Four

Just wanted to capture and share a few thoughts during this fourth week of “sheltering in place” for my own mental time capsule, and in case you are wondering what other people are thinking (since it has been about a hundred years since anything like this has happened).

We are continuing to make an effort to prevent the continuous and rapid spread of COVID-19 by keeping to ourselves, 6-feet apart.  My county is up to 97 confirmed cases with 7 dead.  These are the only numbers I check daily.  This practice reminds me of a line in an old Jewel song.  “I’m sensitive and I’d like to stay that way.”  Big numbers in places far away just feel like more than I can carry, or do anything about. I’m afraid that makes me small-minded, but not afraid enough to change what’s working.  Not yet.

I’m writing this post from my new work-from-home station - A folding table set up in my bedroom with a sheet for a tablecloth, and a lamp I will move back to my bedside table each night.

This came about yesterday evening, after finding myself increasingly grumpy throughout the day.  I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, so I did what I do.  Sat down and wrote a list of all of the things that were stealing my peace.  I was surprised at its length.

- Increased emotional pain for the sick, dying, and grieving due to social distancing
- Decreased ability to allay it or accompany those who are hurting.
- Slow computer
- Website access issues
- Uploading issues (for kids’ homework submission)
- No comfortable work-from-home space
- Tension between feeling the need to be at home and need to be elsewhere
- Tension between the risk and benefit of visiting those who are most vulnerable

I felt better when I saw the list had some legitimate and substantial items, and even better when my husband offered and created a solution for the one thing he could fix.  (My solution for the same problem was to go sit in the car.)

So, here I sit in my new “office”, fully aware that if/when this virus affects anyone in my family or anyone we are responsible for, my list will look like a Christmas list rather than a list of reasons I was struggling.

This silent accumulation of things adding their own unique weight, however slight, helps me to understand the way people have been asking, “How are things going with you?” as though we’ve suffered a loss unique to us.  I can see their question as an extension of the compassion they are feeling for themselves and for all of us in our “collective grief”, as we live without our routines, fast food, and contact with the people who bring variety, love, and respite from our own thoughts.

As I rack my brain for ways to love those who are hurting and mitigate the other things on my list, I find myself thinking more and more like a 5-year-old.  In fact, I got my first blister from drawing with chalk today, at age 42.

I would scoff at a physician if she handed me a prescription for surviving a pandemic that read “Draw with chalk on a friend’s driveway”.  But, I wrote the same prescription for myself today and it didn’t seem so laughable.  “Go outside.  Do something for someone else.  Be creative and get chalk dust on your hands p.r.n. for duration of COVID-19 pandemic.” (signed illegibly, H. Dixon)

While I’m writing prescriptions on my new imaginary prescription pad, I am loaning some out, too.  Particularly to the dying who don’t think about dying, but about taking one day at a time, and to the person who said, “Stay out of your head because it is too dangerous a neighborhood to be in alone.”