Notes from a small (stay at home) island: Day 1
Aka everyday insights in a time of crisis
School’s out and while parents the country over seem to be jumping with Joe Wicks and downloading micro scheduling tools so they can work and homeschool simultaneously, Easter has come early at our house and I’ve given my kids a week off.
With two of the four of us separately & unexpectedly in hospital last week for non-virus related issues, my family’s got a number of extra adjustments to make. Plus, I’ve got the small matter of some food to buy, having been unable to get even a normal week’s worth of shopping last week.
We’re a very lean ‘one in, one out’ kinda family, and over the weekend my feelings of scarcity about how much (little) food we had in had been wrestling hard with my deep desire to stay home.
I looked at my phone as I put my coat on to leave the house this morning, and saw a photo – supposedly taken that very morning at our local supermarket – of isles rammed with people fighting for food & long queues. My stomach sank and I wondered how long I could eek out what we had at home.
The fear gripped me for a moment.
But I decided that at some point very soon I’d need to go, so now was a better time than later. It’s not going to get better later. Not just yet, anyway.
So I zipped my coat up and stepped outside.
When I got to the supermarket, it was calm, well stocked, relatively quiet, and people were keeping their distance.
Nothing like the photo I’d seen.
Not even remotely.
I’d fallen into the fake news trap. What is, or has been, happening in supermarkets around the country was NOT happening right this very moment on my own doorstep. Yet, for a brief moment, I had believed that it was.
And this is the danger for us all as we close our doors.
We have no way of experiencing life on the outside.
We have no way of being able to tell whether what we’re being fed by the media is true or not.
We have no way of being able to balance the fear and panic being streamed at us on all fronts with our own experience of the world.
Now I feel calm again.
I feel like my insight was an important reminder that as we lose our own personal experience of life outside the walls of our own home, we must become, and remain, much much more vigilant, aware and challenging of what we’re shown about what’s going on in the world.
We must use the only tool we ever have available to us and that is the ability to manage our mind. To quieten our fear based thinking and keep the rational, critical, thinking part of our brain in charge.
None of us will manage to do that all of the time – fear is a natural response to uncertainty – but if we are to manage our own mental health & wellbeing in the weeks ahead we must be aware, intentional and purposeful about where we focus our attention, what we allow in and what we believe to be true.
And now the doors to my home are shut for the foreseeable future.
I’ve no need to be out.
I’m doing my bit for us all.
I’m staying home.