Time and Space

This is a season of reemergence. 

After bunkering away for over a year, Americans are leaving our fortifications by the millions. We are saying hello to offices, remembering how to hug and shake hands, and breaking bread once again. It is a season for both shedding skin and deciding which boundaries to carry forward. 

If you are reading this, then you survived a virus that’s taken over half a million lives in our country and continues to take them at terrifying rates across the world. Because we are still among the living, I believe it’s our duty to re-emerge as intentionally as possible, to make the next chapter of our lives as thoughtful as we can. 

Intentional re-emergence takes more than just following CDC guidelines. It’s also about discerning the new guidelines we’ve built for our own lives, lifting up and applying our lockdown lessons. We must discover how we’ve changed, checking in with ourselves and our cells, especially after our democracy went under threat and the national movement for racial justice ascended further up the mountaintop.

Personally, I have two new guidelines that I will more consciously deploy, each uncovered and refined over various stages of quarantine. Both of these guidelines shape my energy drastically, yielding their own fruit and forms of action. Ultimately, they are both about facilitating greater presence, connection, and impact. 

Use Speed Selectively 

This is my time guideline: I will thoughtfully choose the pace I set for myself. I will hustle whenever needed, but not as my default. I will temper my deep seated fear of stagnancy. I will let effort and rest dance together, even as the accelerating world attempts to put them into opposing camps. I will see what new magic their dance can empower.

Quarantine helped me unlock the power of slowing down. While speed is an essential resource, often vital for our survival, lockdown revealed many of the ways it gets overused, at least in my own life… I remembered how to sleep through the night, rather than wake up in the wee hours to work. I finally cracked the code of homemade kombucha. I learned to make bone broth, overcoming my irrational crockpot fears (and I experienced how that broth can enhance many of my go-to meals). 

These became new nourishing practices, showing the cost of trying to keep up with ‘everything’ else. During key portions of lockdown, this ‘crockpot gear’ better equipped me to share a home office with our eldest daughter, to start more regular reflection through these blog posts, to sit and map bolder pursuits of justice. 

In this season of reemergence, the crockpot gear still helps me to enter and experience the current moment... to hit pause, to accept my children’s invitations to play, and to forgive myself for all the times I fail to do so, enabling new emotional habits rather than old feelings of guilt, more love rather than harsher self-critique. 

Crucially, this is only one of the gears I need to thrive. My ‘the world is on fire’ gear is also vital. It enables both swift and sustained action, helping me to meet consequential deadlines, to overcome the resistance inherent in driving big changes, and to respond to the demands and possibilities of a larger moment.  

Though wildly different, this gear can also help us to be more present.

In the world at large, speed is what helped our schools and workplaces pivot to virtual offerings in record time. It aided millions of Americans in forming the largest protest movement in our nation's history, standing up against the latest waves of police murders of people of color. Speed keeps us from napping through the revolution or just staring through windows of opportunity until they close.

As I keep learning to use speed selectively, I will ask: Is this a crockpot moment? Time to blaze a new trail or heed the calls of the frontline? Or is it something in between? 

Stillness fuels Solidarity

Throughout lockdown, our relationship to space also shifted. The scene for our days changed dramatically. And, more than ever, we were able to set that scene. Not all the time, or all the way, but we had much more freedom in where we spent our waking hours. 

This, of course, was a position of privilege, a privilege shared by all of us who started working remotely for the first time during the pandemic. It was not shared by plumbers, dentists, nurses, service workers, home builders, or other occupations where following a zoom link won’t cut it. And it was not shared by the many millions who lost their jobs. 

But it was the experience of most readers of this blog. While recognizing the privilege of remote work, many of us also learned how to wield it, how to move less and root more. Over the last fifteen months, we traded drive time for more walking. Social outings were swapped for check-ins over screen and, ultimately, simple phone calls. 

Meanwhile, on my block, our group of neighbors grew closer and closer. Driveways were the new places to be. Visiting on one another’s porch became a bold adventure. And even with masks on, stories flowed like never before. The experience reminds me of the insight in the TaoTe Ching, “Stop leaving and you will arrive. Stop searching and you will see. Stop running away and you will be found.” 

This led me to my space guideline - To strengthen my connection with others, I will first deepen my roots. 

It’s counterintuitive, but this guideline also has political applications. As new levels of solitude emerged during the pandemic, so did new forms of solidarity. When George Floyd and Breonna Taylor were murdered, the protests that followed were matches hitting the dry timber of nationwide reflection. At least for a time, the hustle and bustle of daily activity halted and powerful movement action filled the void. Our sudden introversion fueled real individual and institutional change.

Guiding Yourself

These two guidelines are helping me to live from an expanded heart, to find a deeper joy in our whirlwind of a world, even as it keeps twirling and spinning. Your own lessons will vary. Takeaways from the pandemic cannot be standardized. But they can be shared. And through that sharing, perhaps, our collective psyche can continue to evolve. 

What guidelines will you live by as you continue to reemerge?