I’ve been thinking about an important little word, the conjunction “and”. What would we do without this little bridge-builder that brings together pairs like life and death, inside and outside, crisis and opportunity? When we put these words together, each becomes more, they are better together.
When I was an early childhood teacher, we would recite this verse along with gestures that ended with a circle of people holding hands:
And here are you
And here am I
And you and I are we!
Some of the most important lessons in life begin in early childhood. We are connected, you and I are we, separate and together. During a crisis, connections matter more than ever; they steer us away from divisions and dogmatism which indicate that we are stuck, unable to see the other side, to access “and”.
Nature provides a template for connecting opposites, for finding balance. There is day and night, inbreath and outbreath, ebb and flow. It is hard to imagine one without the other. There are times when they are in balance. The spring equinox is an example of day and night being equal; other times, the balance is tipped in one direction or the other, according to a pattern. Every night is followed by day; we can find solace in that.
Our human biology consists of two types of nervous systems. They are the sympathetic and parasympathetic. The sympathetic nervous system revs up when we are threatened, it provides that jolt of adrenaline necessary for the fight or flight mode.
It is meant to carry us through short periods of stress. Then when all is well, the parasympathetic nervous system takes over for recovering, resting, and digesting. It is the calm after the storm.
Before the pause began, many of us, were caught in a rats’ race fueled by adrenaline, a stress hormone the sympathetic nervous system kept churning out. We were in a contest to have more and do more. Our lists of things to do were impossibly long, but we were too busy engaging in those tasks, to take time and reduce it to a more manageable load. The excess adrenaline disturbed our sleeping, eating, and thinking.
We searched for faster internet, the latest phones, more facebook “friends”. Even when sitting together, people could be seen focusing on their devices. Our lives became consumed by stuff and that stuff demanded our attention. No matter what, there was always more to want, to consume. It was a cycle of wanting, getting, then wanting more.
Then without much warning, everything stopped. We had little reason to go out because everything was closed. We got to thinking about what was working in our personal lives and in our world. We considered the health of our society and whether it was serving some more than others, whether it could be more equitable, whether it could serve us all. What would a world like that look like?
We started thinking about how facing death reminds us of how important it is to live fully while we can, how being home makes us appreciate our connections, about how consuming less makes us stop wanting more. We became reacquainted with quiet, with slow, with those things that require our full attention to truly see.
What if we could have health and economic stability, time apart and time together, the ability to handle stress and then take time to rest and digest? Perhaps the pendulum had to swing from one extreme to another, before finding the middle, the point of balance and equity. Isn’t that what we all really want?
That is if we have the privilege of choosing, if when the pandemic hit, you could sequester in your safe and cozy home to enjoy fine meals and rest and netflix. But if you are black and you have been hard hit by the illness and ongoing economic inequity and police brutality, you may not have these choices.
Today is the day our stores are opening, but they are shuttered in solidarity because black lives matter and enough is enough! We Americans are black and white, our country is for all of us. How will the pendulum of justice swing now?
I pray it is toward social and racial equity and compassion and healing. It’s in our power. As we have demonstrated during the quarantine, humans are adaptable, when we identify a problem we can find and implement solutions, but first we have to stop being the problem.
