Do you find yourself lamenting, "when will we get back to normal"?
In working closely with Trauma for decades, the longing to return to things as they were is natural. Life turned upside down, the unspeakable devastation, the loss of contol and safety disorients identity and meaning.
We have all been trained toward the immediacy of fixes. Push a button and we are transported from our inner pain into the portal of escape known as technological devices. Seeking comfort we miss the strengthening stretch of our discomfort. It is asking us to change, shaping us to never be as we were. We are never going back.
The question is, what will you become? What meaning and movement will you find?
In our "social distance" be curious how we did that all along in our minds, who we hate, who we love, who we pretend to be interested in as a means toward our own end.
Be interested in our reach now for others, the potential for good use of technology.
But do remember that this plethora of outreach can become yet another distraction from the inner work at hand.
Unwittingly we might be offering connection but adding to the stress in the overload of information that becomes more noise. That noise is not only of the mind but the nervous system. Be sure to take an hour, half day, whole day to digitally detox to restore your system. The urge, in our hypervigilance born of trauma, to check news, connect in, needs our guidance so we protect our health and well being. 5 minutes of news 3x per day from reliable sources is enough. Curate the information and offerings, more is not better.
The signal to pay attention to is: What is asking to change, in you and your narrative, habits, and life's meaningful engagement. And what change is being asked of the larger systems that our individual system is embedded in?
In what way has our privileged distracted life atrophied the robust resilience that comes in staying present to adversity?
Might there be value in discomfort? In what way is Covid19 a teacher revealing both our patterns of limitation and of possibility?
Can we refrain from immediate remedies of personal pain for long term development of character, care, true connection.
We are in a global trauma. The virus on one hand an equalizer, each of us susceptible and our interconnected systems disrupted. But on the other hand, the impact and devastation is very unequal. Far from the milky bathtub of superstar Madonna, Syrian refugees are unprotected in all ways. Can we care beyond our own inconvenience to know their happiness is linked to our own? That might be too much to ask now. But if we choose not to escape into our push button entertainment, (and yes, even this covid 19 has become our entertainment), we might dis-cover the deep teachings of our inter-being, uncertainty, death, so we learn how to really live.
We will never be the same. We are never meant to be. We are meant to move and be moved. We are meant to be shaped by our interaction with our environment. We are meant to be changed.
Decide how.