After several weeks waylaid by brain fog, I finally worked on my novel again yesterday. Hallelujah! It was only for an hour, but I cried happy tears. Sure, my eyes were exhausted by the end and my mind was losing focus, but I did it! And I was fine. Or was I?

When people are fine, do they put their pants on backwards? Do they get lost driving to the gym they’ve attended for over thirteen years? Do they stop at green lights? Or are they the sort of people who know what they ate for breakfast and how they spent their weekend? The sort of people who can hear a phone number spoken aloud and translate it into typed digits? The sort of people who don’t have to wonder whether they will ever be capable of full-time employment again?

Lucky bastards.

I say that with love. Most of my favorite people are lucky bastards, at least when it comes to healthy cognition. I hope you’re lucky that way, too.

If you’ve lived with long Covid for a while, though, then you’ve probably experienced the heartache of beginning with happy tears (“I wrote!”) and ending with sad ones (“I did too much.”) It isn’t that this is the biggest, baddest problem anyone could ever face. A passing glance at news headlines confirms that there are worse things. But we can’t always zoom out from our problems, holding them in a global or cosmic perspective—or at least I can’t.

In, out, in, out.

For me, this is the rhythm that suffering demands. Lean in, and allow myself to feel it. Then step out, and feel that everyone else is suffering, too. Lean in with compassion for myself. Step out, and extend that compassion outward.

Maybe it would be easier if suffering asked just one thing of us. If we could master a single stance and thereby conquer heartache. But instead, we are asked to move. To be flexible. To sway. To allow the ebb and flow, the up and down, the in and out.

And so, as I write this, I’m smiling because a house finch is singing outside my window, his red head moving up and down like notes on a staff. I am allowing myself the small happiness of watching him, without imagining it to be permanent. I will probably cry again today over my addled brain, and I might also cry about Ukraine, but there will be more birds, too, and more songs and more smiles. In, out, in, out.

What are you leaning into today? How will you sense when it’s time to move, to shift, to sway?

P.S. If you haven’t lived with brain fog or haven’t tried writing fiction, then you might be puzzled about the fact that I can write you this email but struggle to work on my novel. I think it has to do with the amount of material I’m trying to balance when working on my novel versus when writing these emails. In the former case, I’m considering the arcs and perspectives of more than a dozen characters and attempting to trace their stories along a non-linear timeline. To write these emails, on the other hand, all I really need to balance and recall is my own recent experience. I just write from whatever I’m feeling today. I am so grateful that I can still lean into that. In, out, in, out.

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