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?

Humor.

That Discomfort You’re Feeling is Grief

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.

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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!

Calm also has a coefficient

I Want to Write Something So Simply

The Willies

Can I get ahold of my soul?

We are in trying times and when “tried” we historically come together, bringing the best of ourselves to whatever needs to be done.

With the coronavirus we are asked to stay away from each other. To isolate, instead.  

It is a perfect time to reflect on not just who you are, but who you could become. Enjoy John Cottingham’s article, and take a moment to consider who you were meant to be.

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What is the soul if not a better version of ourselves?

John Cottingham, is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Reading, professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Roehampton, London, and an honorary fellow of St John’s College, Oxford University. His latest book is In Search of the Soul (2020). Published in association with Princeton University Press an Aeon Strategic Partner

What is the point of gaining the whole world if you lose your soul? Today, far fewer people are likely to catch the scriptural echoes of this question than would have been the case 50 years ago. But the question retains its urgency. We might not quite know what we mean by the soul any more, but intuitively we grasp what is meant by the loss in question – the kind of moral disorientation and collapse where what is true and good slips from sight, and we find we have wasted our lives on some specious gain that is ultimately worthless.