covid-19 season: what I’m learning and loving

I have written next to nothing (other than approximately 2.7 days of journaling, some Instagram posts, and a good bit of insurance-related stuff for work) since quarantine started – back on March 14th for us. I’ve been missing it, but I also didn’t really have the energy (or mental space) to do much about it. When I noticed that I hadn’t done a “what I’m learning and loving” post since February, I realized that I’ve really missed that monthly rhythm, so instead of beating myself up for not sticking with it, I’m going to try to record some things I’ve been learning and loving during #covid19season. Hopefully, that will be the jump-start I need!

What I’m loving

A mostly empty calendar. For the last few years, we have been far more selective about our schedules: creating more margin, saying no more, blocking off days to just stay home. However, Covid has shown us that our normal lives still required A LOT of scheduling. With our kids going to a charter school 30 minutes away, the school commute alone gets a bit exhausting after awhile. Add to that church meetings, sports practices, work commitments, and socializing with friends, and it meant that our calendars were very full. Grant and I have had many conversations about how we can preserve this slower pace even once Covid is more manageable.

Working from home. I LOVE working from home. I would prefer to do it in a She-Shed of my own away from my children, but I still love it. I get so much more done from a work standpoint, but I can also easily multitask throughout the day with laundry, dinner prep, or movement. I’m much more focused at home, so I’m much more efficient when it comes to my work hours too. I would happily never go back into an office.

Our garden. I don’t want to go to the effort at the moment, but I bet our garden is on every “what I’m loving list” for the summer months since I started writing these lists. But I’ve never needed the beauty and break of the garden more than 2020. A global pandemic means that anxiety is the water we’re all swimming in, so the grounding that the garden and being outside provides has never been more necessary to my mental health. Grant and I have wanted to build a greenhouse for years, but I’ve been joking with him that we might actually need to for our family’s mental health for the Covid winter ahead.

Our trail. We live within walking distance of the Midland Trace Trail, which was just completed late last fall. We’re all on the trail at least once a day, if not more. It has literally been saving our lives throughout #covid19season.

Cold showers. I never thought I would be the one to go ALL IN on the cold shower craze. I listened to podcasts with Wim Hof for YEARS, appreciating his wisdom about all sorts of things (and I just love his personality TBH), but just thinking that cold showers weren’t for me. I don’t know why, but around April, I decided that I needed to shake things up: work was super stressful, elearning felt impossible, and I felt like I was barely treading water in just about every area of life.

Around this time, Melissa Urban (who has been on fire during quarantine – follow her if you aren’t already), did an Instagram live about how she has added cold showers to her routine. I decided to try to commit to two weeks of cold showers to see how I felt. And I got completely addicted. I went all-in and do the breathing beforehand (a type of pranayama for you yogis). I noticed that I had lots more energy, slept better, I had a little more fuse in the tank, and I just generally felt better. I’m now a solid three months in, and I’ve been researching ways to DIY a cold immersion tub in the garage so I’m waaaay down the rabbit hole. Some reading/listening/watching if you want to get started:

• Cold shower benefits and specific mental health benefits here
• Wim Hof on Goop Lab
• How to ease into cold showers
• Do the Thing podcast on cold showers
• What Doesn’t Kill Us by Scott Carney (more on this below)
• Wim on Rich Roll (here and here)

What I’m learning

Covid is a revealer. When we first started quarantine, we were exhausted. Some of this was the anxiety and stress in the air for sure, but I think some of it also was that our “normal” pace of life just isn’t sustainable. So even though we try to be really intentional about our calendars, our normal pace was still rather exhausting. When so much was stripped away, it was easier to see the ways in which our schedules enabled us to skim the surface of things. Covid has made it easier to see things that have become “easy buttons” for me, and it has especially opened up my eyes to how much I worship control and planning. We’re obviously still very much in the midst of it, so I don’t know what the other side looks like, but I know that there are plenty of things that I’m not interested in returning to.

The Work is a relay – not a marathon or a sprint. After the George Floyd murder and Black Lives Matter protests, I, like so many of you, recommitted to my anti-racism work. Racism, patriarchy, white supremacy are the water we swim in as Americans, so this work will be lifelong work. I tend to run hot, so I don’t have trouble getting worked up about an injustice, but I do have trouble not burning out.

I had always heard that justice work was a marathon, not a sprint, but then I read Michele Norris’ obituary of John Lewis. She said that Lewis “took the billy club they beat him with at Selma and turned it into a baton, a relay man running toward that promise in our founding documents that says all men are created equal when the word ‘all’ really meant some and not others.”

The imagery of a relay race is so much more fitting – and not just for justice work, but for all Work. The work we do to confront our past hurts and traumas; the work we do to love ourselves and each other better; the work we do to expand our consciousness; the work we do to care for all creation better. It is all lifelong work, and we hopefully move the needle in the specific ways we’re gifted to move it – and then we pass the baton off to the next generation. For whatever reason, that analogy has helped me to think more sustainably for the long haul.

It goes back to the idea that “there is no there there.” That everything is a continual journey.

The tension of speaking up for your beliefs and maintaining relationships. I am not really learning much about this to be honest, but I have been reeeeally struggling with it in a heightened way since Covid started. Count on Americans to figure out a way to partisanize (yes, I made up that word. It means “to make something about partisan politics that at face value doesn’t have to be”) a global pandemic. And then add onto that racial tensions that have been simmering for – oh – centuries. Mix in some inept leadership from the top, and it makes for crazy-making in how we relate to and talk to those with whom we disagree.

To be honest, I’ve been experiencing this disconnect since Trump was elected. I couldn’t (and still can’t) understand how people who spoke about the importance of integrity and values – people who not only gave these things lip service but taught me about faith, values, and integrity – could justify supporting someone whose life demonstrated the complete opposite of what I had been raised to admire and respect.

So I don’t have any conclusions here other than to name this difficulty for what it is, to acknowledge that this is really hard, and to let anyone else reading know that I’m sitting with the tension too – and often not very well.

YOUR turn…what have you been loving and learning during #covid19season?!