We all need to loosen up a bit, inside. These are not normal times, and they won’t be for a while. A pandemic with different mutations still emerging, mounting deaths and sickness, economic damage, access to testing and vaccines being not as easy as hoped, the continued stress and loss due to the various types of lockdowns, and even if you should be doing ok, the mere stress of the world in pain around you and the resulting social and political problems – all of this is surely enough to drive anyone slightly into depression or insanity.
We have to all make allowances for both the people around us and for ourselves these days. We are not automatons. Human beings – like all other animals – need a specific habitat, and ours is social, as Aristotle noticed already. As social animals, we are hurting right now, and we do not know when there will be a return to normality, or at least a modified normality.
Don’t put more stress on you and others than already in place, and adjust your expectations. I certainly have to, but we can all also count our blessings. This pandemic has taken a gruesome toll already, and it is not over, and it will not be the last. Lowering our expectations for ourselves, and being happy with what we have right now, and just taking care of us and others around us – all of this can be enough. Maybe not just for now. There’s certainly a lesson in the now for the future as well.
Whose life is it that you are living? Who do you care about, who cares about you, and how can you maintain these relations even in complicated times? How can we be human, fully human, in inhumane times?
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