Cultivating Resilience In Hard Times 103: Celebration & Beauty

I’m writing this in October, the 70th month of 2020, in the year of our Despotic Overlord COVID-19. The pandemic has shoved 2020 into the record books as a year of disruption, loss, and a cognitively dissonant suspended animation.

Many of the people, places, and things from before are still there, but nothing is quite the same. We must navigate this strange world from a distance, through literal masks and shields, with cleanliness and safety foremost in our minds. This macabre microbial jousting match is a sideshow as we wait for something definitive to happen, for something equally disruptive to disrupt the first disruptor. Where are the game changing therapies? What about vaccines or some foolproof masks?

One could be forgiven for taking lockdowns, bubbles and pods, a canceled Olympic Games, and widespread distance learning as signs that this season of Life On Earth is canceled, but it's not. Life On Earth has new rules, an unreliable show runner, and lots of plot twists, but it's not even on hiatus. That's the thing about life, as long as we're here it just keeps rolling along, no matter how we feel about what's happening.

Now what?

We haven't done this before, but doing our best is the right approach. It's flexible and aspirational where we need it most. Doing our best affirms that we have some choices about how we meet the world. It also takes the ability to grow and change into account.

Don't forget to give hope a chance

Every week I get to learn about the amazing people working day and night to help patients. Even before the pandemic people were preparing for this moment, and they've cranked it into another gear to give us the best chance of turning this terrible situation around.

My 2020 resilience practices

I finally got my aunt to put up an arch for our green beans!

Initially, it was meant to just keep me gardening and protect myself from the strain of bending over or putting stress on my shoulders while picking the beans. It worked! But the best part was the reaction from everybody in the neighborhood. We live on a corner, and people look forward to seeing what we'll grow each year. What started as a hulking mass of ugly wire fencing and posts became a fan favorite. People kept stopping to tell us that it was pretty, and that "people could get married under it!"

I hand raised and released over 20 butterflies

Butterflies are one of my favorite things. They're beautiful, magical, and metal. They go through a series of make or break stages that involve hatching, unzipping their own skin, dodging predators, finding what they need, and becoming themselves.

I'm planning a virtual birthday party

Grief reactions to my mother's death put me off of my birthday for many years. Things started improving 2016, but elder care and traveling for work kept getting in the way. 2020 was going to be the year to gather my folks and get things back on track. Zoom it is!

What can you celebrate this year?