Here it is early in the spring of 2020 (Easter morning actually) and the world as we knew it just a month ago, seems like a distant memory, thanks to the Covid19 crisis. The scale of disruption and change is beyond anything I have certainly experienced in my lifetime. The new normal is so abnormal, it is hard to know at this point what we will be going back to, once the pandemic has eased.
With this level of change, there already is and will continue to be losses we will all see in many facets of our lives. Losses are and will continue to turn into hardships, shattered livelihoods, closed businesses and for many, loss of loved ones through death from the virus.
While in this “sheltering-in-place” quiet, I find myself thinking about the writing I was doing in the year after Kathy died. I shared some of that at http://myopenheart.blog and is part of what I did to help me move through my grief process. I decided now might be a time to morph that personal perspective into something new, since collectively and of course individually, there is and will be a lot of loss, that will lead to a lot of grieving and eventually healing, as we continue through the CV19 global crisis.
As I was working through my personal journey of loss, I knew I was headed to the point of (having to) getting to create a new life for myself. As I look at this period of upheaval we are in, I see some parallels of what is becoming a collective journey through loss, that will undoubtedly give us a chance to create an entirely new life. I am now deciding to explore what might lie on the “other side” by taking the blog that was “My Open Heart” into something new for today, that I will call “Our Open Hearts”, now at http://ouropenhearts.blog .
That title describes what I both want to see happen and what I actually believe is happening. In this upheaval, I am seeing hearts opening. Opening to each other, as we find ways to help family, friends, coworkers and strangers through the new challenges. Opening to ourselves, as we have more imposed time of isolation, that perhaps enables reflection and reassessment.
I am making some clear choices in terms of where I am putting my focus. I am choosing to be prudent and careful in supporting the guidelines for interacting safely. And I am also choosing to look for and pay attention to the care, compassion and love that is finding its way into the lives of so many. I am inviting you to look at your world through this lens and join me in finding ways to sustain these experiences, all while we work through the challenges that are in front of us now and that lie ahead in the months to come.
