Coping with Covid

Life has been a real roller coaster these last two years, hasn’t it?

Record storms and fires, a contested U.S. presidential election followed by an attack on the Capital when the sitting president didn’t like the results. Oh, and a pandemic that just won’t quit. (Who would have thought there’d be this kind of world-rattling pandemic in our lifetimes? Not I.)

Life has been turned upside-down for many of us.

• Remote work as kids attend school virtually.

• Rampant unemployment and resignations.

• Grocery store shelves emptied of toilet paper and hand sanitizer.

• Hospital oxygen supplies depleted.

• Masking. Having to consult the NIOSH Certified Equipment List to be sure the N95 masks you buy are legitimate. (According to the CDC, 60% of respirator masks sold in the U.S. are counterfeit.) The CDC suggests double-masking as a substitute which I did for tai chi class but with Omicron raging in Wisconsin I also ordered (real) KN95 masks.

Life has been and is likely to remain crazy for the foreseeable future.

How are you managing? Are the habits you set in place during calmer days still working? Are you leaning on less-healthy practices more than you'd like?

Because of being sidelined by Lyme disease – I’d been working on an exit-plan long before Covid-19 struck – my situation is a little different. These last 18 months were spent nurturing my body and mind and working toward healing. Until last fall, I’d confined myself to home except for medical appointments, 14-minute grocery runs and get-togethers with my bubble-friend. 

That said, my habits have not been good. Oh, food and drink intake are generally good (except for holidays) and I’ve been sleeping well. (What a delight that is!) But I have two struggles:

1. While I say that meditation and yoga are important for my well-being, I don’t make them happen. Every effort at scheduling fails. My Google calendar has three (3!) weekly commitments with lots of blank space. I make plans but too often don't follow through. 
   I am playing piano regularly so there’s good along with the mediocre. But what will happen when I start working again if I can’t make these into habits now?

2. Then there’s Sudoku. I learned to remove Solitaire from devices so that I don’t lose whole days mindlessly. I had hoped that deleting the Sudoku app from my tablet would free me from this black hole. But one day I found that I could casually play online. Oh, dear.
   I tell myself that having something with which to check my fatigue level is beneficial – if on good days I can solve “Evil” puzzles, then when I find “Hard” ones taxing I can cut back on other activities. This works (but at what cost?) since I can solve most puzzles. I say this not with pride but with an awareness that I spend entirely too many hours at it. 

I am a work-in-progress. That's okay.

I might write about shame another day. For now, I’ll simply say that when I feel inclined to keep something to myself I look for a way to shine light on it. That’s one of my reason for sharing this story. (None of us need more shame.)

Another reason is so that I might have credibility when I ask how you are managing. Life is wonderful but it can also be a bear – and there’s been a lot of bear lately.

If you’re reading this, you already know suggested ways to help yourself. Mayo Clinic offers a good list. I might add:

• Do more of what nourishes you and, where possible, less of what depletes you.

• Find ways to help others.

• Allow yourself time simply to be. We’ve been trained to be “human doings” but we need the other as well. “Being” freshens the mind and enhances creativity.

• Hum. Yes, this sounds strange. But years ago I read that humming eases anxiety and it works for me. If you’re not musical, hum tunelessly. It the physical action that matters.

That’s it for today. Stay healthy. Be safe.

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What I Know

“Write about what you know.” Anyone with an interest in writing has heard this, read this, more times than we can count – and with good reason.

Although most of us grew up within a family setting and many of us as adults work and/or live with others, no two lives are the same. We may share a similar environment, facing the same joys and predicaments. Yet we interpret each meeting, each moment, with a mindset shaped by past experiences of other people and other situations. And each day of living adds further input for a constellation of insights that expand and contract, refine and hold fast, tear down and rebuild our knowledge, opinions and beliefs. It’s truly amazing that our minds can keep up with this.

But I digress. I was talking about why it makes sense to write about what we know.

We tend to dive deeply into those topics that capture our interest – studying, researching and generally keeping our radar active so we can notice new tidbits about the objects of our passion. The longer we have been living with our interests, the more time our hearts and minds have had to refine our thoughts. What we were passionate about last year may not have stood the test of time while other concerns that we didn’t think were exciting may have surprised us, worming their way into our psyche. (This one particularly happens with experiences of failure, illness and other losses.)

What do I know? I know about . . .

• The joy of making music – alone and in ensembles.

• Teaching, as a band & choir teacher, as a homeschooling parent and as a substitute teacher.

• Parenting two wonderful people. Shepherding them through childhood and adolescence, I made plenty of mistakes. Now that they have grown, I learn that parenting really is a lifelong venture.

• My rocky marriage. Having divorced after 25 years, I don’t call the marriage a failure. A lot of it was painful and hard but I am who I am today partly because of that relationship.

• Living with undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome. While I learned of my AS only six years ago, looking back I realize that it touched every aspect of my life for as long as I can remember.

• Following a call to pastoral ministry that led to seminary and a long road to ordination, both while serving churches.

• Chronic Lyme disease that led to deteriorating health, the blindness of a medical system that does not acknowledge this disease has a chronic form, and my ongoing battle toward remission.

• Transitions – from marriage to single life, from health to illness, from employment to medical leave...

Of course, I could add more points to this experience list but, in short, I know – really know – only those things that are or have been a part of my life. The list of things I don’t know about is much, much longer. While I understand this intellectually, I sometimes get caught talking like I know more than I do. (But then don’t we all?)

I write all of this as an introduction into a new chapter in the Fierce Joy & Hope blog. I hadn’t intended to stop two years ago. It just happened. I lamented the loss but with the long hours at church and the growing fatigue caused by the Lyme disease I couldn’t do differently. I’ve been wanting to reboot for a long time but that fatigue left me with no energy to put toward that endeavor for almost as long.

At long last I am ready to try.

I’ve changed in the interim. Even without a pandemic, we all have. Some of my topics will be familiar to those of you who have read this blog in the past. Some will be new, reflecting the person that I am now.

If you used to find truth in my words, I invite you to join me in this journey to see where it takes us. If this is your first time reading my words and you find the reading worth your energy (all things take energy!) you might like to venture with us also, at least for a time. Either way, maybe you’d like to click the blue “Follow” button.

After hearing Dory say “Just keep swimming” in Disney’s Finding Nemo, I adapted the line and made it my own. (I'm sure I’m not the only one!) Whenever I’m facing a challenge, when I have a chore to do or a call to make but not the stamina, I tell myself, “Just keep breathing, Jayneann.”

Until we meet again, through all that may come your way, “Just keep breathing.”

    

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Keeping Secrets

I wrote this entry about eight months ago but then shelved it for a time. The secret I thought I had, ended up not being so much of one as I'd thought. Yet, keeping secrets and maintaining integrity is a real concern for me, and maybe for you...

As an Aspey[i], I pretty much gave up lying and secret-keeping about the same time I left my teen years behind – simply because I was so bad at it. I never had a poker face. And if someone asked me something related to any information I was trying not to share, I couldn’t come up with a convincing half-truth in that split-second before they expected an answer.

I admit that I once thought I was "holier" for doing this but I finally admitted that I simply stopped doing something I was bad at anyway.

Now I have a secret. Though I’ve shared it with a few people, it seems best to keep it to myself for the present.

And I don’t like it. Being so out of practice, it’s hard. As yet, no one has approached me with the dreaded question, but how long can I expect that to last? And what will I answer? Besides the whole “I’m a lousy liar” there’s the issue of integrity. I want to be honest.

Contrary to what we may have learned, keeping secrets isn’t necessarily bad for a person. Michael Slepian, professor at Columbia Business School, studies the psychology of secret-keeping. In a recent study, Slepian surveyed people about the nature and extent of their secrets. Earlier, he had discovered that the bigger the secret, the greater the potential harm to its keeper. This time, he wanted to examine the connection between secret-keeping and lower wellbeing. He found that rather than the secret’s content, what mattered was how often a person thought about their secret – the more they thought of it, the lower their sense of wellbeing. For many people, the sense of inauthenticity is what is most damaging.[ii]

Hm. Inauthenticity is the biggest threat to my well-being.

In Wired for Authenticity: Seven Practices to Inspire, Adapt & Lead, Henna Inam, CEO of Transformational Leadership Inc., talks about a leader’s need for authenticity. I haven’t read the book, but I read Skip Prichard’s conversation with Inam about the 7 Practices of Authentic Leadership that she proposes. #5 resonated with me.

Choose Be before Do ... ‘Who am I being right now? Am I acting from inspiration or fear?’ [This is a big question for me.] Who we are being is constantly changing. ... We are constantly doing – without slowing down and getting curious about who we are being.’[iii]

I'm so busy doing, doing, doing. I do because

• I have a job and people expect me to accomplish things. I'm a people pleaser (and I need the paycheck);
• Besides working at my job, I have a home to maintain, dishes and laundry to wash, grass to mow, etc.;
• Beyond all that, I want to be out-of-doors, planting, weeding, pruning, walking. 

In the last year, it's come to me that even reading is doing and I've tried to be intentional about noting the difference between the being and doing. But doing is so much easier. In doing, I don't need to face that I'm not being the me I'm called the be.

‘Who am I being right now? [iii]

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[i] A person with Asperger’s Syndrome

[ii] http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2017-20428-001 as referenced at https://www.thecut.com/2017/05/keeping-secrets-isnt-bad-for-you-with-one-exception.html

[iii] https://www.skipprichard.com/7-practices-of-authenticity/

Is it really "All about Trust"?

Those with insight find prosperity;

Happy are those who trust in God.

                                Proverbs 16:20

The United Methodist Church is again in the news as The New York Times reports voting fraud at General Conference 2019.

In reading the article, this doesn't seem to be an issue of deliberate malice. As Germain Unda Mupasa, an unauthorized delegate for East Congo expressed, there are often visa issues, so African conferences have many reserves. These people of faith simply want to make sure that they have their assigned number of delegates voting for what they believe is the faithful response to the question.

Still, trust has clearly become an issue for the Church (and in other settings). The Book of Discipline has nothing in it about voting irregularities because in the past it's never been an issue. “The polity of the United Methodist Church presumes trust," explains Laceye Warner, a professor of Methodist studies at Duke Divinity School. But she adds, “The last several years, the ethos of the denomination has been characterized more by mistrust and misunderstanding.”

Have we been naive? Or is this legitimately a new and modern challenge?

Where do you find yourself in this conundrum? And I don't mean on which side of the divide do you stand regarding the right of clergy persons to marry GLBTQIA+ persons and of the acceptance of these previously, and again, discriminated-against persons to be ordained and to serve as pastors. 

No, what I am asking is:

• Where is trust in all of this? Is trust truly being violated or are people still acting in what they believe is “good faith”?
• In whom are we to trust? Of whom shall we be slow or hesitant to trust?
• Is this voting issue really an issue, as the media has made it out to be? Or does this reporting merely muddy the waters, serving to keep the UMC debacle in the public eye?
• What are your criteria for trusting someone?

I ask this last with all sincerity. A year ago, I found myself trusting someone... unreservedly. For a period of months, all was good. Yet things have changed. I defend them be reminding myself that we are not static creatures. We change with our experiences – our opinions, our feelings, evolve.

Still, the trust that once seems like an easy choice, I now question. Would I do the same today? I don't know...

Yes, I do. I can blame it on the AS[1], if I like – for good or ill – but I've always been recklessly trusting. This'll never change and I’m not sure I’d want it to.

I choose to trust – and to love – with equal abandon. Individuals and institutions may break my heart (and have) yet I will go on.

(Knowing who you are is a good thing. How would your three-sentence self-definition read?)

    

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[1] Asperger’s Syndrome