I am the solution.

Yeah, I said it out loud and it’s time you started saying it too. Be the solution, get all Chevy Chase from Caddyshack, “Be the ball Danny, see the ball…” what do you want, it’s golf season in the year of Koyannisqatsi.

Ambiguous Loss

You will hear more about this word, it’s what’s happening to us all. Here is how Benedict Carey described it in the NY Times:

“Rather, they are trying to manage an interruption in their normal development, child psychologists say: a sudden and indefinite suspension of almost every routine and social connection, leaving a deep yet vague sense of loss with no single, distinct source.

The result is grief, but grief without a name or a specific cause, an experience some psychologists call “ambiguous loss.” The concept is usually reserved to describe the experience of immigrants, displaced from everything familiar, who shut down emotionally in a new and strange country. Or to describe disaster survivors, who return to neighborhoods that are hollowed out, transformed.”

Sound familiar? When golf practice started a couple weeks ago, we had all forgotten how to talk and interact with one another. Luckily, we’re a resilient species.  Now let’s move forward.

Whineypunkitus

The trauma is real, the loss is real and the transformation is real. But the light is shining brighter every day and we have to pull up our big boy pants and get moving. Get vaccinated (through legit ways or by having your daughter call you because they had extra doses at the Vets Hall and needed arms to put them into), make a plan for March, get rid of stuff, get your body and mind moving again, and build some new planter boxes like in my Geometry class. Stop fighting about change (inevitable) or loss (RIP Pablo and Tom and Bob and Jewel and Marcie and 2,500,000 other people) or what you cannot control (the virus, politics, your boss, the weather). And STOP COMPLAINING, this is messy and we’re all just doing the best we can. Finally, make a plan because without a map we get lost.

Post-Covid Workbook   

This is the newest project which I’m creating this for my students, four sections (Self, Family and Friends, Work, and Society). Kind of a how to get from where we are to where we want to be. Step one, baseline self-diagnosis (Watch “The Moped Diaries”, complete an interest profiler, understand why empathy and grit are vital). Step two, connection strategies to family, friends and the earth. Step three working hard is awesome. Step four how to learn from the last few years. The virus has shaken education, democracy and society like a giant snow globe which may and should look very different when it settles. The book is a work in progress, I’ll keep you posted.

Love and Gratitude

Do you have special people in your life? Cherish them. Have your choices and hard work enabled you to live in a beautiful place where people from not so beautiful places go on their vacations? Cherish it. Are you healthy? You know where I’m going with this. I now know that 8 hours of sleep is vital for me, that sugar and bread are mostly bad for me, that family is everything, and that nobody is breaking down the door to celebrate the work I do but if I’m happy with the results, maybe that’s enough.

Every day above ground is a good day, start there.

What are you really worried about? What do you think about first in the morning? What can you change? What should you just accept? This is life and it’s not easy nor should you expect it to be easy because getting over the tough part is much more satisfying than living the easy part.

Need more meaning? Volunteer to help with vaccines at SVHS on Sunday or email Anne Flanders about how to help the local homeless, or donate to the Food For All program or go tutor at the Teen Center. And if you have an idea, say it out loud, tell your friends, post it and be proud of it. We are all in this snow globe together, please act accordingly.

Be the ball Danny.