Living With COVID-19: Adapting to a New Reality
A word from Board President, Tournesol Kids, Harriet Beinfield:
Living With COVID-19: Adapting to a New Reality
by Harriet Beinfield and Efrem Korngold
Our New Reality
Most of us are struggling to reconcile ourselves with a new reality. Habits and routines are upside down and inside out. Economic instability is rampant. Ordinary coping mechanisms have evaporated as we shelter in place. We’re cooped up alone, with family, or friends without the usual breaks. Feelings are raw and some are unfamiliar, like being as out of control as we are. We live as we dream, alone. Yet we’re all in this together.
Uncertainty Is Our New Master
Normalcy is interrupted. Millions of us are caught in one giant pause. We’re just coming out of the initial adrenalized overdrive and it’s dawning on us that we don’t know when or how this will end. Uncertainty is our new master.
Some have extraordinary adaptive skills and know how to make lemonade out of lemons. Many are anxious and weary, exhausted by the effort this adaptation demands. Many are facing the grit of survival. Know that this is a hard time, even for those grateful for a home with food in the fridge.
How Are You?
What’s hardest for you? Are you learning anything about yourself that might qualify as a silver lining? What worries you? Where do you find comfort?
A Pregnant Pause
Because early adoption and strict compliance show the stay at home order to be working, it makes no sense to stop anytime soon. Whatever comes next, it’s unlikely that we will return to what was.
We need a new normal. This event has laid bare how wobbly and poorly organized we are for human good.
The biosphere is faring better without our normal. What will we give birth to on the other side? It’s up for grabs and it’s up to us.
What Will Come Next?
Will we mend our relationship to air, water, forest, animals, climate? Can we fiercely tackle income inequality, racial disparities, health access?
Can we reshape our ecological, political, social and economic needs based upon our humanity and interdependence?
It requires enormous courage, creativity and will to reinvent the structures we’ve put in place that threaten us. Stakes are high. But isn’t it in the darkness that we see the stars?