Together, Apart

I’ve been keeping a quarantine journal and it amazes me how some days feel like they stretch on forever, while some seem so short. There are days that feel productive while many feel, well, less than.

We will emerge from this time, changed. All of us, independently and collectively. How can it not be so? We will crawl out of our caves, we will carefully take off our masks, we will lay down our gloves and shelve the disinfectant. And the world will look different. Together, apart, we are learning new ways to do things, new ways to collaborate. Our gratitude for human touch rising, we will see things differently when all is said and done.

This time of extreme unknowing, of living into what is, of fighting together, apart against an invisible enemy, will not go without its lessons and scars. We will emerge mourning lost loved ones, hopefully appreciating each other more. We will rebuild small businesses and new ones will rise up. We will applaud the health care workers, the grocery store workers, the teachers who scrambled to create lessons online, the restaurant staff who runs orders to our car, those folks who keep going to work while the world stays home. We will applaud the sewers who tirelessly stitched face masks when we were told to cover up. We can and will, emerge smarter and more compassionate. It must be so.

For together, apart, we are standing together, offering ourselves in new ways we hadn’t considered before. And in this time of unprecedented quiet, our planet is healing and taking a breath. We are growing. We are growing as human beings, wonderfully and miraculously made, in spite of, not because of, the blundering of our federal government and our narcissistic president. A president who has not uttered one compassionate word since all of this began. A president who looks only at the dollar sign and not at the people he was elected to serve.

We will celebrate the end of this time, where we come together as citizens of the world, reaching out our hands to one another. We will hug each other and kiss each other’s cheeks and look to the future. For now, together, apart, we fight to make this world a more compassionate place.