How many would agree with me when I say that I feel like I’m operating at about 65%? Tasks seem to take about a third more effort than I often feel I have to give them. Or at least a third more than I used to have.
Ironically, in many ways, I feel as if my life is much less complicated now since the beginning of the pandemic. Unnecessary pressures I used to put on myself I no longer do with such emphasis. Places I used to feel obligated to go and activities in which I felt obligated to participate feel much less important than they used to. Some of them will return, but they will be less mindlessly done. Personal progress.
However, there is a consequence to this natural sifting and sorting we are doing in our society right now. There are emotional, and therefore functional repercussions for having nowhere to turn where the effects of the pandemic have not left their mark. Every single thing in our society has been held up for consideration.
It’s Marie Kondo on a global scale. We will ultimately part with all that which cannot bring us joy.
Not to say that joy shall be the only goal. But there can be no joy without real fairness, without justice. Without our health, or our potential. And because of that, now that everything is up in the air, what’s left standing in the end shall be what we truly prefer. Caveat: that which prevents our joy does not go peacefully.
The birth pains of this next age are personal, and they already require the normal attentions to which all grief is entitled. But most of us also have a significant existential concern about the future of this planet. We bear our worry over the world we leave to our grandchildren.
Those grandchildren are already deeply afraid and frustrated about the world they’re about to inherit. It has raised the depression levels among teenagers to their highest in recorded history.
The pandemic has added a layer of unrequited grief and panic to an already conflicted world. We are schooled, and warned, every day about the consequences of our actions. They are grave.
You have a right to be sad about it. You have a right to grieve about the state of the world and the experience it is going through right now. You have a right to acknowledge how this impacts the functioning of your own daily life, and of your family. It slows things down.
It’s okay to take things slower right now. It’s okay to acknowledge that your fuse is a little shorter and that you’re trying to be mindful of it. It’s okay that you’re a little more forgetful and a little more disorganized. It’s okay to need more help than you used to for the same tasks. It will not always be the case.
Acknowledge the way grief affects you and do for yourself the same as you would to emerge from the loss of a loved one. Be kind to yourself.
Pace yourself. Forgive yourself. Cut some slack for others who are all going through the same. Try to maintain optimism about the future because good things are occurring every day in this world, and many of them are happening precisely because of the great but difficult reckoning we are having. Love is at the heart of it. Have faith.
We will come through. There has been steady progress in a positive direction for many decades now, look to it. We are loving and strong by nature. And our nature will win this war. In many ways, it already has.
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