Getting just past the initial shock
The novel coronavirus is a shock to our system, whether we fall ill to it, or fall prey to the ills of avoiding it. We have been adapting our little fannies off. To overnight changes in our habits of communicating, interacting, and tending to one another. Of finding our way as we breathe through fabric.
Shock waves still send us this way and that. Various kinds of fatigue have set in.
Fatigue beyond any normal relationship to energy expended
In more than two decades of interrupted sleep I have spent middle-of-the-night hours writing poetry, consumed by worry of one kind or another, and in meditation, prayer or silent movement practice.
These days, weirdly, I sleep soundly. I can take a 2 or 3-hour nap and still sleep through the night.
While I can find myself energized for a few hours at a time, I am fatigued beyond any normal relationship to energy expended. Some days I am flat out exhausted.
Telehealth consult with Dr. Google
So I did a telehealth consult. I asked Dr. Google about “fatigue during pandemic” and found that I can check all the boxes for potential causes of my condition:
– fears both practical (income loss) and existential (life-threatening illness)
– grieving interrupted, and complicated by losses both deeply personal and loss of familiarity and certainty
– quarantine fatigue, formerly cabin fever – even though I am a serious introvert
– information fatigue, in spite of the stringent limits I place on the frequency and sources where I get my news
Moral fatigue
Most meaningful -and revelatory – was the decision/moral fatigue factor: the effects of constantly assessing and reassessing benefit to risk for myself and my husband. The moral weight is greatly upped by my awareness of the many “strangers” who have no economic choice but to risk themselves as they maintain the countless service sectors going that keep our daily lives from truly collapsing.
Still, life is life: it moves, and it asks us to move
And in the fullness of this fatigue and my craving to hibernate, I feel a physiological and psychological stirring, to move, an urgency to get out and DO in my preferred ways: change something for the better. One action at a time. And still I continue to entertain hopes of being a “bigger” influence, or part of a bigger change.
Whatever our individual temperaments – and fatigue – these impulses to upward and outward movement are fortified by rising spring energies, flowers in bloom, and the greening of trees. The season that holds us is different. My emotions too want to move up and out of me: anger and irritation. In Chinese medicine these are the emotions associated with the spring season.
So I continue to weigh consequences. In an environment rife with uncertainties and with few trustworthy guidelines, I do my best to discern, consult with good people, draw on my inner resources. I do my best to stay awake.
The societal body too wants to move on, even as our masks threaten to blindfold us
We see this same natural rise of the desire to move at the civic level. As the viral wave flattens, or not, the social and financial stresses of quarantine and isolation prod the societal body too to seek its movement. This takes the form of calls to “open the economy,” “to get back to normal,” or at least to begin to test out what “new normal” might be. And whatever the state of our personal guidelines, the state of our civic guidelines is fragmented, inconsistent, and very much localized. And poorly resourced whether we consider needed supplies, imagination, vision, or spiritual resources.
Let us meet this urge of the societal body by seeking the right questions, not the right answers
And as human beings who are awakening and healing, this is a time to PAUSE and ask ourselves:
What do we think we know – about ourselves, what we desire, what we fear?
Who we believe we are or are becoming or are meant to be?
How do we locate ourselves in the world?
How we locate the Pandemic in the scheme of human and divine history?
It is more likely to be our questions, than our answers, that shape our lives in the months and years to come.
If we choose to consistently and insistently lead with these types of questions, our leaders will – eventually – follow.
