If you aren’t in the small pool of subscribers reading my novel, All Is Well, then it’s been a while since you’ve heard from me. I’ve missed connecting with you! As I’ve navigated my own physical ups and downs (more ups than downs, thankfully), I’ve found myself wondering how you are doing—especially those of you who are also living with long Covid.
“How are you?” seems like a simple enough question, but when a friend asked me this recently, I found myself temporarily stumped. This was the sort of friend who asks how you’re doing because they actually want to know, and I want to give those friends actual answers. I was surprised at how long it took me to figure out what that answer was, though.
How am I doing? How are you doing?
If you’re riding the tsunami of a single intense emotion, then that question may be easy enough to answer. It’s rare, though, that I feel just one thing. This morning, I took my dog for a walk in the rain. I paused to watch the way that beads of water cling to the bottoms of bright red honeysuckle berries. The droplets tremble before they fall—an excited little dance that made me smile . . . and then made me think of a New York Times video I saw of a 5-year-old Gazan boy. He says he trembles when the bombs fall. He says he is thirsty because there isn’t enough water. Thinking of him, I felt just one thing: grief. But that feeling soon blended with others because I was in the woods, and the canopy was a drum, playing the downbeat of rain, and the leaves were red and gold and brown, and the world holds both beauty and pain.
We need our grief, and we need our joy. We need our laughter, we need our tears. If we cling only to “positive” emotions, we become callous and disconnected. But if we hold space only for our anguish or rage or fear—telling ourselves, perhaps, that it’s unfair to find joy in a world so full of suffering—then how will we respond to life with anything other than reaction, recrimination, and retaliation? We need our joy. We need beauty like we need love. We need the creative and compassionate spaces that these open inside of us.
If there is one thing that long Covid has taught me, it’s the power of moving slowly through the world. The power of pausing often. My body still needs this, though to a lesser extent than it used to. My soul will never stop needing it. Now that I can do a bit of hustling and bustling again, I’m noticing a trend. I hurry and scurry about, driving kids to and from activities, prepping meals, washing dishes, coaching clients, writing this or that. These are all things I want to be doing, and yet, I’m not bursting at the seams with joy every moment that I’m doing them. Here’s when the flood of joy and gratitude comes: when I pause. When I take a deep breath. When I look around me or gaze up at the sky. When I step into a hot shower. When I do one thing mindfully, rather than three things with my attention scattered.
These pauses create space for joy, beauty, gratitude, and love. They also create space for grief. Maybe that’s why it’s hard to pause, hard to make space. It’s an act of surrender, and we don’t always know what we’re surrendering to. It sometimes seems easier to outrun the full weight of our own feelings. It might seem easier to ignore what’s happening in the wider world. We sprint onward, forcing grief to morph into something else: anxiety, dread, apathy, exhaustion, rage. Maybe we worry that if we let the grief wash over us, we’ll drown. But when we outrun our grief, we outrun our joy, too. We outrun our aliveness. I don’t have a tidy step-by-step solution to this conundrum. But I know that when I allow myself to feel grief—whether it’s my own personal grief or the grief I feel for others—there’s beauty tucked deep within the folds of that experience. It hurts like hell. And it feels like an offering of love—to myself, to others, to the world. Maybe grief is the opposite of joy only in the way that the north pole is the opposite of the south pole—two sides of the same thing.
I’m trying to pause often enough and long enough to let that spinning ball catch up to me. To let it show whichever face it wants to show. To let myself surrender both to the pull of gravity and to the lightness of space swirling around and through me. Sometimes the grief feels like too much, but when I stay with it, I find the leaves changing colors. I find that the earth continues to turn. Sometimes, I find a new and kinder way to walk its surface.
May the earth continue to turn for you, too. For all of us, may it turn in the direction of greater compassion, gentleness, and creativity. May it turn and turn until we willingly fall into one dizzy heap, where we no longer pretend that your pain is not mine and mine is not yours. Where we no longer abide this fiction of separation.
Maybe something is making you feel separate and alone today. Maybe something has you inwardly sprinting away from feeling anything at all. Whatever is happening on your little patch of this spinning world, I wish you water to quench your thirst, autumn leaves to awake your senses, and loving arms to hold you in your times of trembling.
You know what a grief champion I am, so this really resonated. I hasten to add that although I champion the acknowledgement and embrace of the grief that comes with losses of all kinds, I still find myself hovering above my own a fair amount of the time. Grateful that you are sounding the mindfulness bell for me today.