What can we learn, how might we grow?

Yesterday, I overdosed on Coronavirus news. Between the time I woke up and when I fell into bed last night, I must have consumed fifteen hours of updates from dozens of sources around the world. And while I might have known the "new case" counts in North Carolina and the US and the daily death count in Italy and Spain, this information did nothing to make me feel wiser. It only escalated the tenor of my anxiety dreams last night (in one I was lost on a beach, trying to find my broken glasses; in another, I was on a high platform, trying to keep children away from edges where there were no guardrails).

In many cases, information can give us a sense of control over the unknown. In this case, with the fire hose of information coming at us hourly, it seems to be giving us the opposite of that.

What can we learn from this situation? How might we grow?

I’ve just returned from picking up milk and essentials for some older neighbors and was shocked to see the line winding around Trader Joe’s in the rain. Rather than wait, I went next door to Wegman’s. And yes, while there are some empty shelves in large supermarkets (I know it’s different in smaller, more urban neighborhood markets), there is still plenty of food. It made me remember the much longer lines I waited in in the Soviet Union in 1991, only to find when I finally arrived at the entrance, nothing more than pasta, jars of pickled green tomatoes, fatback and if I was lucky, milk or bread. Never coffee.

A friend from church, Lynn Springfield, signed an email yesterday that she was looking forward to better days in the fall when things would be back to normal. I imagine we will all see things differently when we are finally past this.

One thing our family is re-learning, which I am appreciating, is how to live in slow time with each other. With work at an ebb, schools closed down, social gatherings cut off, and time for the first time in a long while, to be together without an agenda, while not without its frustrations, still feels good.

242 years ago, Abigail Adams said to her 12-year-old son, when he protested traveling to St. Petersburg to be the interpreter for his president-father’s diplomatic mission to Russia (which involved sailing across the Atlantic, traveling for two months by mule across Spain and the Pyrenes, then trekking over 1200 miles across the Netherlands and Russia),

“It is not in the still calm of life… that great characters are formed. The habits of a vigorous mind are formed in contending with difficulties. Great necessities call out great virtues.”

There are plenty of necessities out there and many people who are rising to help meet them in creative (and sometimes very moving) ways. Here are some examples from around the world and down the street:

• Italians making music for and with each other from their balconies
• Two 20-year-olds recruited 1300 people in 72 hours to deliver food and medicine to vulnerable seniors in NYC
• Raleigh Village East, an Aging-in-Place non-profit, calls neighbors out on their porches for music on the streets
• Spaniards did exercises with one another from their balconies
• A neighborhood in Australia set up a survey to help one another on Next Door
• Over 300 engineers got together online and started the project to come up with something people could build out of readily available materials and 3-D printed parts. They’ve already got a prototype.

As Fleet Admiral William Frederick Halsey, Jr. once said during World War II, “There are no great people in this world, only great challenges which ordinary people rise to meet.”