No Guarantees
Covid-19 has taught me that a long life isn’t a guarantee. Actually, it’s taught me that education, graduation, work, toilet paper, soccer practices, and being with family and friends aren’t the guarantees I had assumed them to be.
As isolation continues to whittle down my schedule and obligations to almost nothing, I’m left with two more weeks of the teaching gig, clients meeting via tele-health, a house full of five kids whom we are now homeschooling, and an amazing husband who now “works” from home and takes me on walks and runs when he sees I’m about to lose it.
Sooner than later, restrictions will be lightened and although we won’t go back to normal, and we will inevitably and tragically experience more losses to covid-19, we also will have to make decisions about what we will add back in to our lives.
This leaves me in the middle of a big question.
Side note: I just learned on a writer’s webinar not to share unresolved struggles, but I’m not going to follow that principle. Sorry. Instead I want to share my wrestling match with you because I think it would be good for you to have one of your own.
Anyway, the question leaves me sorting out a jigsaw puzzle. Pieces of my lived life I am trying to fit together even though they can’t ALL make it into the picture. Too many pieces. That’s my life. Five kids (and all entailed in raising them to be compassionate, critical thinking, and educated contributors). A business. A teaching gig. Friendships. Family. Maintaining wholeheartedness (for me that includes fitness/solitude/good books/writing/nature/quality coffee).
The question: How do I actually live my priorities?
What lies before me is the undeniable contrast I have now experienced as a result of the pandemic. Contrasts related to time and its lack of guarantees. Contrasts related to how ridiculous my responsibilities and schedule had been before the pandemic and how I now long for a more realistic pace and purposeful existence.
I’m holding the contrast and I’m not in a rush for the answer to the complexity of the big question that’s surfaced. As orders lift and eventually our family returns to work and sports and school and active lives, how do I stay away from what Thoreau calls the life of quiet desperation that I had been living for so many years?
How do I live my priorities?
That’s the question I am wrestling with amidst the covid-19 reminder of no guarantees. We don’t actually have, as Marvell describes, world enough and time. The question makes for a worthy opponent.
Dive Deeper…
Learn about our Attachment Course by clicking the button below.
