Suffering? Opportunity!

What is your position on social distancing, quarantine, isolation?

Suffering? Opportunity!

We’ve all been suffering in one way or another from the corona virus. My sincerest sympathies if you have been ill or lost a loved one to the disease. Just know that the rest of us are sick too. Our illness is mostly mental.

It is called depression!

• We have lost our jobs and have all the same bills we had when we were working.

• Our children are home all the time, all day, all week, all month! We love them and appreciate the fact that we can spend this precious time with them. But please, just let them shut up for five minutes! I’ve never been so exhausted in my life!

• Those of us that are introverts are loving this chance to NOT interact with the extrovert world. No more exposure to the loud talking, joke telling person who thought it was his job to lighten up the atmosphere in the office… all the time, every day, anywhere! Trouble is, we’re starting to think the life of a hermit looks good. All that work we have done on ourselves to fit in socially--right down the drain thanks to social distancing!

• Then there is the feeling grown children have been having lately. They would just as soon not spend every Sunday dinner and holiday with their now, semi-senile parents. And include the brother-in-law that really drives them cray-cray! Thanks to social distancing they no longer have to support all those family get-togethers. For health reasons, of course! They can maintain, or even enhance family relationships, from a distance. It’s a win-win!

• Our wife/husband is starting to not look as good anymore. It would help if he/she wore something other than sweats! What ever happened to skintight yoga pants and three piece suits or uniforms? Make up models on QE2 are actually wearing false eyelashes and zit cover-up. I gotta get me some of that!

• Where are the teachers and day care workers when you need them? I need them and I need them NOW! Did you know they are really angels? Shhh! Don’t tell anyone! It is true. I bet they were never tempted to give a child a snarky answer. Or forcibly put them into bed at nap time. Or even cram a sandwich into their closed lips at lunch! They just use their angel powers to deal with these situations. Situations that are currently making me and every other stay-at-home parent…crazy! And impatient! Did I say that? I mean making us extraordinarily patient and long suffering!

Quarantine, social distancing, and isolation have given us all a chance to do a little self-examination. What else is there to do? Besides wrangle children and eat, of course. We can determine what our values really are. And whether our cell phone and service is adequate!

Do we like ourselves? This quietness means we are more alone with ourselves that we ever were before. Do we find areas that need tweaking, things we would like to learn more about, skills that need practice? This is the time to invest time and attention.

Rather than be depressed, perhaps we are better served if we are challenged. Be our better selves? Learn more about the world that is OUT THERE on the other side of our closed door. Prepare to enter the re-opened world as a better person. Toss aside the depressed, entitled, paranoid person in us. Develop the energetic, interested, empathetic person we really are, or at lest that we can be.

So, thank you social distancing, and quarantine and isolation, for all the good, quiet things you are nurturing in us. And watch out world outside the door…here comes the new and improved me! Ready to “get after it!”

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Comments, insights, personal stories? Tell me! Karenmac1999@hotmail.com