I've been distracted. The experience of navigating a global pandemic has definitely drawn me inward, and I've pressed pause on doing any reflection or sense-making. I can only describe my life over the past couple of months as weird. Sometimes things feel almost normal, like when I'm walking the dog on a forest path or making pizza dough for Friday movie night. Other things, though, are so far outside of my notion of normalcy that I have to stop myself from thinking about it too much. Like parenting two kids in quarantine for almost a month without once putting my arms around them for a hug. A visit to the emergency room while under pandemic lockdown. Even grocery shopping online--not being able to smell the basil before I purchase it. It's been so deeply disorienting that I have largely abandoned my effort to consider significance in my life.
But now my kids are mostly healed and our routines are mostly established. I have the cognitive space to breathe and think. So, in honor of Cinco de Mayo, I poured myself a strong margarita and logged on for a Skype catch-up with Sara, one of my partners in crime from our PhD days. In addition to having lots of good laughs together, Sara has always been a reliable critical friend, and we have done some our most profound learning together. She asked me a steady stream of challenging and fantastic questions to help me jump start my re-entry into my work on this project.
She asked me - how am I working on healing from past trauma? Ack. Mid-pandemic, there's even more trauma piled on the heap, courtesy of whatever virus struck my family and inspired the most acute fear I've ever experienced. I had no idea how to answer the question. The truth is, I don't even know how to start. My past strategies have included compartmentalizing and telling myself to buck up, which are probably not super effective. Granted, the first step is acknowledging that there's trauma in the first place, something I have historically felt strangely guilty about and have attempted to ignore. So, step one, complete. But what comes next? I will add this to my learning list.
She asked me - what exactly is it that I want to achieve as part of this project? I did a little better with this one. My answer right now is that I want to meet two parallel goals: (1) to internalize how to move forward with my personal and professional lives in a way that brings me intrinsic satisfaction even when they're challenging, so that (2) I can serve myself and others in way that feels significant. There's joy wrapped up in this somewhere too, but I can't yet articulate that with any degree of sophistication. So I need to do some work on the joy part, but it's getting there.
She asked me - have I made any progress in terms of feeling significance in my life? This was also a tough one, and made me realize that it will be difficult to gauge my progress unless I have some kind of metric to work with. Can you create a significance rubric? Well, we do this kind of assessment in even the softest of sciences, so it totally makes sense even though I don't know what it looks like yet. I'll need to reflect on my baseline from the beginning of this project and go from there. Another thing to add to my learning list.
I walked away from my conversation with Sara feeling lighter and re-committed. It made me think of the moth pictured here, who has been hanging out in our front doorway for the last few days. The moth is resting, re-grouping, generating energy before it leaves the shelter of our stoop. You can nudge it a little bit but it stays put because it's not quite ready yet. But true to the Nike-esque just-do-it swoop on it's wing, I'm sure this moth is quietly preparing for action. The COVID-19 pandemic has, in some ways, offered me a similar hiatus. I can feel myself regenerating, internalizing the consequences of this huge change in our lives. Now Sara has, kindly and gently, given me a nudge--and I accept. I'm preparing for action.
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