My buddy Mandrin, who I first wrote about in this blog post: TEN THINGS NOT TO SAY ON A FIRST DATE, sent me an awesome and useful article discussing “The Great Pause”
First of all, I totally recommend you take five, and pop over there and read it.
An excerpt reads: “Smart marketers know how to highlight what brands can do for you to make your life easier. But brilliant marketers know how to rewire your heart. And, make no mistake, the heart is what has been most traumatized this last month. We are, as a society, now vulnerable in a whole new way.”
Secondly, I just want to touch base on how this quarantine is actually helping ME, during my GREAT PAUSE. Third, I want to know about your reactions to quarantine and the great pauses ya’ll are taking for yourselves.
For me, I got lucky during quarantine. I mean that figuratively and literally. I spent the first week after March 14th frozen in some form of stasis, unable to think, move, adapt, adjust, do anything at all, except freak the fuck out, feel like I was in jail, and worry about my life. But then, because of a serious of previous steps in my life, I ended up with an awesome new roommate, a phenomenal quarantine team, basic income coming in, a deep sense of usefulness and a new shiny (who my dog is in love with, and who can cook). What? Talk about a weird shift.
I am starting to feel things again. It’s been about a month and some days since my quarantine began, and I almost have a handle on my new life. Social distancing, cooking for myself, hanging out with my nephew, Calvin, while his parents work from home, practicing live-streaming on Twitch and working out. All of this is good, useful, functional, connecting and happy, which means, I am starting to feel like crying again. like crying quite a bit actually. As if once the potential of floodgates actually open, then that potentiality could just explode across my heart. There’s no way my heart could actually become MORE OK DURING QUARANTINE could it?
Anybody else experiencing the cognitive dissonance which resonates across their quarantine experience? My buddy Mandrin certainly is, and we have been FaceTiming about the level of better we both feel, being IN quarantine compared to the level of shut down, stressed out, frustrated and upset we felt before quarantine. How crazy is that? Not really that crazy at all. There is something relieving about the whole world being awash in a global pandemic and all the scientists demanding we shut down and the governments actually HAVING to listen to them. When the fuck has that ever happened before? never. Never, never, ever, has our government been forced to stop forward production or halt capitalism, or send us any money as an entire nation. This is a big deal.
I gotta say, this matters. We could all have universal healthcare. We could have a basic universal income of $2000 a month. We could grow our own food, cook it, and raise our own children and dogs. We could connect with our neighbors in weird ways. We could do this. If we all worked together. How crazy is that? How cool? How cool would it be to feel ok? To feel as if life could keep going on in a sustainable, effective, world compassionate type of way?
I would love to live in a world where I got to contribute what it is I have to give, and got to pay my bills and let things pass by. “ What the crisis has given us is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see ourselves and our country in the plainest of views.” (The article)
“ From one citizen to another, I beg of you: take a deep breath, ignore the deafening noise, and think deeply about what you want to put back into your life.”
What do you want to put back into your life? What realizations have you come to during this process of pausing? Thea Elijah’s Fire book talks about a heart meditation, where after the big emotions, big feelings, etc, we breath BACK into our heart, letting the blood flow back into our heart, thus letting all our energy come back into our heart and not being utterly depleted by our lives.
Here’s a link to Thea Elijah’s blog if that sounds interesting to you. She’s a pretty incredible healer in my opinion. I haven’t met her, but she has touched my world in a variety of ways, from letting Bethany work on healing herself, to Melinda connecting and working with her, and now, I am getting to read her work. I really like her effect in my world.
I would love to hear from you. Feel free to leave a comment below, subscribe to the RSS feed, or shoot me an email at finn@finngravesart.com