PhotoCredit: Celebrate
Emerging from a lockdown-ish Thanksgiving that felt a lot more about online sales than it did turkey, I feel confused about what to expect from the rest of the year. Maybe it’s just me. How is it possible to feel fatigue after doing very little over the last four days? How is it possible to feel fatigue when I’m restless for adventure?
We progress through another day, week, month of living with COVID-19. We progress through another day, week, month of changes to the lockdown rules. We progress through another day, week, month of feeling that our lives are indefinitely on hold. It occurs to me that this feeling is not fatigue. It’s disorientation.
Disorientation is, according to my brief poke around google, a mental disorder. “A wide range of conditions that affect mood, thinking and behavior.” Sound familiar? In psychosis form it is “characterized by a disconnection from reality.”
We are lost in a fog of restriction and limitation. Disconnected from reality because our reality exists on shifting sands. Birthdays and holidays and vacations and weekends have lost their meaning. These markers and moments of time that used to ground our experience now create more chaos and confusion.
Spatial disorientation is what they call this when pilots lose their sense of what is up and what is down. This is because our human senses are designed to navigate in a “terrestrial” environment. Our senses betray us when the environment changes.
When flying in these circumstances, the instruction is to trust your instruments. Apparently this is inherently difficult because your human brain is 100% positive it is correct. Many plane and, especially, helicopter crashes happen in these circumstances. Most are deadly.
So what instruments, I wonder, do we have at our disposal to guide us through our pandemic-induced environment change? I don’t have a complete answer to this yet and it's personal. It’s a great question to ask yourself. It might be routine. It might be regular calls with the great people in your life. It might be limiting calls with the not-so-great people in your life. It might be thinking about new goals in an altered world.
I have recently observed friends and family delighting in getting their houses dressed up for the holidays. I break out in a cold sweat thinking about putting up a tree with an inquisitive puppy on the prowl - but I think it needs to happen. Tradition, whether old or creating new ones, is extremely grounding. An added bonus is anything that will stimulate you creatively.
It’s easy to let things slip. It’s easy for it to be too hard to haul the decorations out of storage. To cook a full meal when it’s just one or two of you. To let your vacation time look a lot like your weekends (which already look a lot like your weekdays). Force the celebrations. Don’t let too much time go by as we idle in this low-gear world we find ourselves in. Life is not limitless. Make the moments count!