This is a wonderful day. I’ve never seen this one before.
Maya Angelou
We’ve all been listening and reading about how to best handle the quarantine so there is little reason for me to duplicate the advice you’ve already read. What you must do depends upon your circumstance. Your days could be busy with kids. Or you could be living with a partner or living alone. Working, out of work or retired. In any case, I suspect you are striving to create order.
A lot of people are experiencing an underlying sadness. This is normal. We have lost the life we were living a mere few weeks ago. Some people are way past sad and are feeling desperate. If you know a person who is, help them. Provide them resources. We are in this together – epidemiologically entwined.
It seems strange to see the names of “kids” I went to high school with – in my email inbox. But that has been happening since the corona virus outbreak.
I have not attended any of my high school reunions because it is not a simple direct flight to the small town in Ohio. As I type my reason, I sound more practical than sentimental, don’t I? (I will have to think about that.) Or maybe I never returned because thinking about high school brings up painful teenage memories of sitting at home watching “Gunsmoke” painting my nails while everyone else was out on Country Road E necking.
It has been a LONG time since I was in high school.
Regardless, these people are in my inbox. And while I struggle to put a face to their names, I do get an instant felt sense of the person when I see a name.
The feeling of Larry K, for example, is a feeling of devilishness. The name makes me smile.
And what is Larry sending his high school classmates now?
Scott Berinato interviews David Kessler, academic, author and grief-expert. David is an LAPD Specialist Reservist for traumatic events and has also served on the Red Cross’s disaster services team.
EXCERPT from Harvard Business Review article:
HBR: People are feeling any number of things right now. Is it right to call some of what they’re feeling grief?
Kessler: Yes, and we’re feeling a number of different griefs. We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different. Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.
HRB: You said we’re feeling more than one kind of grief?
Kessler: Yes, we’re also feeling anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. Usually it centers on death. We feel it when someone gets a dire diagnosis or when we have the normal thought that we’ll lose a parent someday. Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety. We’re feeling that loss of safety. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. But all together, this is new. We are grieving on a micro and a macro level.
The School of Life summarized their credo recently, but instead of posting the 6-page article, I have summarized what I think are the bare-bones, and I plan to post it on one of my kitchen cabinet doors!
And yet calm is our practical, efficient, rational alternative.
If you’re on a crowded plane and one person is freaking out about turbulence, the panic will eventually peter out. If, on the other hand, six people are freaking out, it’s entirely possible that it will spread and overtake the rest of the plane. Panic needs multiple nodes to spread.
The same is true with a cabin of 10-year-olds at summer camp. One homesick kid usually comes around and ends up enjoying the summer, because being surrounded by others who are okay makes us okay. But three or four homesick kids can change the entire dynamic.
While calm is a damping agent, it’s not nearly as effective at spreading itself as panic is.
