“Shaken into Reexamination”
This is not to suggest that people who suffer the most severe crisis always come through with the most spirited rebirth. But people who allow themselves to be stopped and seized by the real issues, shaken into reexamination — these are the people who find validity and thrive.
— Gail Sheehy Passages (1974)
A global pandemic forces a radical adjustment to daily living. Shelter in place. Don’t socialize with friends. Keep your distance.
I flew home from a client meeting in coastal Oregon on the evening on Thursday, March 12th (three airports, two flights on Spirit, middle seat, mid-plane for both flights). I brought home a wicked cold but nothing else, thankfully. I have been homebound now for 23 days, not quite a month.
Yet, this has not been all that difficult. I have had multiple set-backs in the last 20 years that somehow prepared me for the COVID-19 (said with the same reverence we use when we say 9/11 or Pearl Harbor) era.
You can read about my setbacks and my personal growth in a book of essays called The Low Wire and in a short memoir called The Guests. I could give you a personal litany of bankruptcy, divorce and unemployment (2003–2004), or losing my executive director job at the end of 2008 without severance and the short selling of my house in 2011, or the stroke I had in 2015 which knocked me out of the workforce for five full years, forcing me to live below the poverty level but thriving otherwise in terms of friendships and creative output.
But I would rather talk about Gail Sheehy’s concept of restored validity, or better yet, authenticity (the same root word as “author”)
This COVID-19 “adjustment” has not a time of great personal reflection for me, because I’ve already done the deep work, 2003–2005, 2008–2011 and 2015–2019. By deep work, I mean intense and extensive journalling, developing a daily meditation practice and expression of my emotions in poems, essay and memoir. I do not fear death, because I have already “died to myself” as we are encouraged to do in Scripture.
I have found Eckhart Tolle’s book A New Earth to be exceptional in teaching about the power of the human ego, and the need to understand the ego as mental construct, a persistent fiction but not in way a reality:
“The moment you become aware of the ego in you, it is strictly speaking no longer the ego, but just an old, conditioned mind-pattern. Ego implies unawareness. Awareness and ego cannot coexist.”
This is not to say I’m not looking for any personal growth during this pandemic. I may lose family or friends, or my friends may lose friends. There will be great loss, but there will also be a global awakening, I hope.
This crisis is not about learning how to bake sourdough bread, or learn a new language, or for bonding with a spouse or children’s in our new cocoon existence. This is a time for you to face yourself. May you, in Sheehy’s words, experience “a spirited rebirth” that lasts for the rest of your life.
