Good (enough) Choices in Bad Times
I have spent most of my adult life experimenting and teaching lifestyle choices that actually ripple up from personal change to social benefit. Yet in the face of this pandemic, these can-do approaches to life’s basics sound tinny. Our freedom of motion is constrained. How are we to “get out there and make stuff happen?” Many are in perilous financial shape, feeling at effect of a cracking economy. Maybe not the time to encourage saving money. Fear of access to basics has driven a run on toilet paper, guns, alcohol and now, amazingly, baby chicks. Committing to localizing your food sources may feel like too big a stretch.
At the same time, not everyone is responding the same. Some are adapting and enjoying it. The run on chicks represents a turn towards self provisioning. Grocers are out of flour as well as paper products – perhaps there’s a revival of baking. My housemate, a woman half my age with a Millennialish restaurant habit, has taken on to build her recipe repertoire and cook dinner nightly. People are figuring out life online; septuagenarians are learning zoom. Some people ping pong between helplessness and fury. We can’t control the virus. We can’t control other people’s disregard for social distancing and masks and keeping everyone safe. We can’t control how well or poorly our public officials are managing the crisis – to put in mildly WRT Trump. We can’t control our prospects for the future. This is the stuff of night terrors, virus or no.
Can we discern the difference between those who rise and those who fall? Those who rise to a challenge aren’t better, those who shrink in the face of trauma are not worse. Maybe the former are in denial and the latter more in tune with reality.
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