That discomfort you’re feeling is grief. David Kessler is the world’s foremost expert on grief and I found his thoughts on discomfort comforting: “Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain […] To calm yourself, you want to come into the present.” An easy way to do that, he suggests, is noticing 5 different things in your environment and focusing on their attributes. When asked what to say to someone who’s read all this and is still feeling overwhelmed with grief:
“One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, “I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse.” We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. “I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad.” Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims.
And this part resonated with me the most: “This is a temporary state. It helps to say it. This is survivable. We will survive.”
Pro tips on how to live in confined spaces by a NASA astronaut and a formerly imprisoned journalist.
The folks at “Death, Sex & Money” podcast put together a pandemic tool kit with resources to distract you, calm you, and galvanize you.
Monterey Bay Aquarium Live Cams. Watching sea otters frolic is always a good idea.
Some of these links are from Laura Olin’s excellent weekly newsletter. If you haven’t already, you MUST subscribe.
I always like signing off on my emails and letters. Lately they’ve been C19-related:
Social distantly yours
Yours from afar
Waving to you from 6ft and beyond
Best (but things could be better)
Take care (no, seriously)
And speaking of valedictions, Louis Armstrong did it best.
After all these years, we finally find out where the name Triscuit comes from (PLOT TWIST: “Tri” does not mean 3"). Confirmed by Triscuit IRL.
This footage of NBC reporter Deion Broxton backing away from a herd of bison walking his direction made me laugh so hard, I spit up some coffee.
“Hi! What is the white cat’s name?”
I loved Manrepeller Leandra Medine’s reply to a reader’s comment: “One time I told my dad that I was bored at the onset of a two-week break from school and he said what I was feeling wasn’t boredom — it was the lull that occurs in order to make an adjustment. Last night, when I expressed my anxiety much the same way I did my boredom all those years ago, he told me that when you’re a kid, it’s a lull that makes way for an adjustment but that as an adult, it’s usually more intense. Sometimes so much so that it’s crippling. Which it has been! I took a lot of solace in this sentiment, starting to believe in [the] fact that maybe I’m not anxious — just adjusting?”
I have been doing a lot of retail therapy lately but maybe I should get one of these house robes before putting a moratorium on my AMEX. UPDATE: Everything in my size is sold out, so whew.
If you’re local in Atlanta and able to, volunteer as a driver to deliver meals to housebound individuals. One of my friends did it today and said it was incredibly easy. Staff members load up while you remain in your car and you just drop off, knock, and leave. She said the whole thing took about 2 hrs of her day.
A reminder that physical distance (and even time!) doesn’t diminish the bond you have with people in your life. IT MAKES ME CRY EVERY TIME.
“Just something to look at and leave.”
If you’ve made it this far, wow! Thank you. I’ll leave you with Japanese artist Yoshihiro Suda’s hyper-realistic sculptures of plants and flowers in the tradition of Japanese woodcarving and National Geographic photographer Eliza Scidmore’s photos of everyday life in Japan from over 100 years ago.
This is a temporary state. This is survivable. We will survive.