photo by Shannon Corsi

If you’re anything like me, right now you’re sitting in your home office looking outside, as nature continues on around you, stuck in what seems to be a bad dream. Several times over the past few weeks, you’ve been on the verge of an emotional breakdown, waking up to the grim news of a national pandemic and trying to make sense of what this means for you and your family. One by one, your choices and freedoms have been stripped: First, school closes. Next, you can only converse with friends from six feet away. Finally, you can no longer go to work and leaving your home at all is inadvisable.

In the beginning, the outlook was lighthearted as mothers posted photos of their makeshift “homeschool” setups, thinking that this fun anomaly was going to be short-lived. Others (maybe even you and I) seemed to be carrying on with family fun and outdoor playdates in an attempt to gloss things over for your children and escape from reality, if only just for an hour. You went through all the stages of grief: denial (This is no worse than the flu.), anger (It’s the government’s fault.), bargaining (If I limit my time in town, I can still hang out with friends, right?), depression (She’s got it all together while I’m over here flailing.), and acceptance (Saddle up kids! Welcome to our new normal.)

It’s been downright exhausting—homeschooling your kids and disinfecting every item that comes into the house all while trying to bang out some semblance of a work-life. And then there’s the worry over your kids’ exorbitant screen-time use, your teenage daughter’s raging fits every time you turn on the news, and the thought that—God forbid—someone in your family comes down with this disease or passes it along to someone in your community.

I get it. But there’s a bigger message in the madness, I think.

Depending on where you live, some of you may be on week two, or maybe even three, of a stay-at-home order. Like me, you may not even know what day it is and you may be oscillating between feeling like one day you’ve got it together, and then the next, you so don’t.

It’s natural to feel this way, as the grief may have passed for you and you’re adapting from a life filled with busyness to one that’s really not too filled up at all. But it’s in this emptiness, this space, that we will eventually find our fullness. Remember—it’s what we’ve been asking for all along? And now it’s here.

This is what today looks like for me:

My house is in shambles: laundry in piles, dishes in the sink, and dog hair balled up in every nook and cranny. I’ve been able to squeak out the bare minimum at work, but haven’t really created anything meaningful in weeks. I’m going to the store like every fourth day thinking I’m shopping for the apocalypse, when really, my kids mow down the food in less than two days and I feel guilty that I need to go back again, exposing the world to myself.

It’s the best I can do right now and I’m good with it. I hope you’re good with it, too, because nature has an order for things.

This pandemic, this worldwide disaster, is a wake-up call. And it’s not just a call to tell us that the right or wrong people are in charge (depending on your political beliefs), or that we’ve been ignoring global warming and creating an environment for a biological disaster, or that our use of pharmaceutical drugs is excessive and we need to reign it in. (After all, there’s no “cure” for this one.)

It’s a call to tell us that we’re doing life wrong. As my guru, Kate Northrop, points out, “collectively we’re being asked to do less … [and there’s] a lot of resistance around that.”

Take a hall pass right now to wear your slippers all day, to let your roots grow out, and to retool your normal. Don’t worry if your “to do” list or your kid’s prescribed workload doesn’t get done each day or if some of it inadvertently falls into the trash as mine did. Take a few deep breaths, and then do a math lesson with your son, even though you have no idea what the EngageNY video is teaching. Rethink your Facebook rebuttal. Hell, why not rethink posting on Facebook at all? And pretend—it’s okay if you have to pretend right now—to just be present, knowing that if you only get through one task a day, that’s good enough.

That’s my collective wish for us all.

Because soon, being present will become part of our DNA—no more pretending. Those deep breaths will come unconsciously and without effort. The aspen trees outside our windows will begin to bud and the migratory birds will return. The quarantine will lift and we’ll come together to rejoice in our newfound stillness. That’s what it’s going to take. Stillness. Doing less. Being present.

For as we slow, the world will heal.