To go a bit deeper into contemplating the impact of the Pandemic on you at this juncture, with so many different views and stages of re-entry, I am posting a quote from a series of Sunday talks I gave in 2017 on "Changing life".
"[We are] walking this line between the collective experience of change, which you are a part of, and the uniqueness of individuality. When we are talking about individuals, we recognize that some personalities are more pro-change than others. Some people are more fluid and adaptable, some people are highly mercurial--they change not just day to day but within the course of a day--they can be a whirlwind, entering to revolutionize the day, if not the world! Some people hold a stable sense of themselves and life around them, not rigid, but stable, reflective, slow to introduce change in their lives, slow to react to change. Others are more than stabilizing individuals; they rigidly, even aggressively resist change. When you put these personalities in the whole mix of life with an overview effect, you get a feel for the roles of those different energies in this collective process of reworking of consciousness.
On the other hand, when you are interacting with a specific individual, you can interpret that personality as petty and undermining, obstructionist, or another as helpful strength, creative inventiveness, or another as hurtful pushiness, or as agitated and exhausting. These are some of the dynamics of interacting with attitudes toward change.
Of course, many people are a mix and are agreeable to change in some situations and highly resistant in others. At different points in life, some feel stagnant in a way that grows into a global thought that everything is stagnant. They push to change friends and partners, jobs and careers, where they live, where they go, what they look like...the unmet longing for change in one area may spread to dissatisfaction in every area of life. Unfortunately, that dissatisfaction and frustration can harden into a basic sour sense of life and pessimism about change.
Others have found a space of security and comfort, having arranged life in a way they enjoy, but they can never quite let go to it because they brace against the possibility of change. There are some that deny the changing realities of life, out of fear; and some who are so insulated within themselves that they really don’t notice that life is changing around and in them.
And there are those that have found a spiritual focus, made peace with the movements of life, but focus on a non-changing transcendent that actually enables them to shift and allow life to just unfold. This is not the same thing as being self-withdrawn from life, but rather, being plugged into a larger scope of life. "
So a next step in facing 'a changing life', is to understand yourself enough to know your own temperament toward change.
And I add for today's thought, as we ponder how we will personally handle re-entry, consider this quote by Howard Thurman (Minister/Author 1899-1981). To me, his words apply today to both the concrete level of social distancing and the broader issue of what value-driven energy will underwrite our lives. (Susan Nettleton)
“There are two questions that we have to ask ourselves. The 1st is " Where am I going?" and the 2nd is "Who will go with me?" If you ever get these questions in the wrong order, you are in trouble.” Howard Thurman