All this has happened before …

The important work is done. The guest bedroom is complete, for now. Ouiser will even have her own TV to enjoy while she is here. The new office, well that is another story, it’s not so complete. There are piles of books and stuff all over the floor. My new desk is in its place, though. And I’ve cleaned off just enough space to write at it.
Dragging the piles of things from one room to the other, I stumbled across this old post-it note titled “Daily Quarantine Questions” from 2020. I don’t remember when I copied down these questions, or where I got them from, maybe Brene Brown. I’m so glad they survived the last five years, because they were an amazing reminder of how to get through chaos and overwhelm.
- What am I grateful for today?
- Who am I checking in on or connecting with today?
- What expectations of “normal” am I letting go of today?
- How am I getting outside today?
- How am I moving my body today?
- What beauty am I either creating, cultivating, or inviting today?
I am 97% sure I don’t need to explicate for you why these questions felt so relevant and perfectly suited to this moment. This is a blog, though, and that kind of thing is kind of what we are both here for, right? Don’t worry, I’ll keep it brief. The sweeping scope and pace of change in the first two weeks of the current presidential administration has felt chaotic, to put it mildly. Announcement after announcement has kept everyone on edge; it’s been hard to find the space to pause between the stimulus and response, to paraphrase Viktor Frankl.
These questions came back to me at the perfect time. They provide a path, showing us how to find the space for ourselves. They also made me realize how much we’ve all internalized since 2020. Of all the things to be grateful for in the past two weeks, the greatest has to have been realizing how we’ve learned to check in on each other when things are hard. Yes, I am purposefully using an expansive “we” here. I don’t think it is just my small circle of friends who have spent the last few weeks, sending a couple of extra texts, making overdue phone calls, and maybe even sending the occasional piece of snail mail. These questions and these practices are the skills we learned five years ago that are going to strengthen us today.
Finding the questions also made me curious about what, if anything, I’d posted about the questions in 2020. I looked back through the archive, something I rarely do, and found this entry, “Unexpected Joy,” from February 2020. If you are new here and haven’t read this book of essays by Hanif Abdurraqib yet, you should. They are great. The post, written in 2020, actually talks more about 2016. It doesn’t mention the questions, but it does address what the questions are meant to help you find – the unexpected joy. Like connections, and maybe even growing out of our connections, joy is essential to our survival, to our healing, to our resilience. I think I say it best at the end of that entry.
Abdurraqib concludes, “Joy, in this way, can be a weapon–that which carries us forward when we have been beaten back for days, or moths, or years.” And I remember how beaten down I felt in the years leading up to 2016. How alone I felt trudging from one crisis to the next just trying desperately to hold it together, to make sure I could provide for my family. Yes, there were moments of joy in those years, friendships made, but I remember how my smile rarely reached my eyes, and my guard never fully came down. In 2016, joy became my weapon. It carried me forward each time an event beat me down. Joy also became the weapon of my recovery. It flooded my life in the fall of 2016: the house full of friends at the birthday party I threw for myself, the renewal of old friendships, the long mornings and afternoons on the deck, the comfort of the dogs and cat as we settled into our new normal. The joy in those moments, big and small, salving my wounds, healing me, and carrying me forward.
Ask your questions, check in with your friends, and may you all find your joy.
Needless to say, the last 2-3 weeks have been very tumultuous. While I’d like to stick my head in the sand, my wife is my filter as she truncates all the news into sizeable bites for me to absorb. I no longer sit in front of the television watching the news. Rather, I’ll do so if we are watching something entertaining like Jeopardy or a recording of Cash Cab. I feed the birds. I go for gentle walks in my neighborhood. I run little errands to get me out of the house. In other words, the world is still here. We are still America. Life seems normal outside the Beltway, away from the hustle and bustle of politics and governance, whether it is right or wrong. I know this sounds quaint, but my father-in-law had a saying. “This too shall pass.” Dad, thanks for the reminder.