It’s Day 4 of the Pause, as my friend Jamie Love calls it, which is way better than my tongue in cheek The Hunkering, but needs vary. ANYWAY, it is Day 4 of this weird moment in time when we change our patterns and habits and our very thinking about everything. How we go to work or don’t, whether to do school work or not, how to socialize with our friends or not. I had this moment when I thought, oh good, if the Teen is out of school and the husband is working remotely, maybe we can just go somewhere warm for a couple of weeks. I would dearly love to hop in the car and just go, but that seems irresponsible. Restaurants are a bad idea right now, as is any travel, and visiting my parents and risking carrying the virus with us is simply not an option.

So here we are.

I had told the extroverted Teen that maybe very small gatherings OUTDOORS for walks might be okay, and then yesterday had retracted that to probably not okay, and then we spent a good thirty minutes discussing how to use this time proactively. To approach it as an opportunity and not a loss.

I then looked to myself and thought, yes, Robin, how about you do that?

A blogger I like, a retired law professor, wrote a post yesterday about happiness. She gathered a bunch of posts she had written over the years on the subject and listed them with commentary. She said she was bored with the news, sick of being anxious and then received a Facebook prompt about an old post on happiness that was a fortuitous prod to write about something else. One her posts had a link to an interview with John Tierney where he answers this to the question, “Is there a happiness mantra or motto that you’ve found very helpful?”

Years ago, when I was researching an article on research into stress, one social scientist passed on a simple tip: “At some point every day, you have to say, ‘No more work.’” No matter how many tasks remain undone, you have to relax at some point and enjoy the evening.

That’s how I feel about reading the news. I need to know what’s happening so going totally dark is irresponsible. But at some point, we need to say, enough, it’s time to focus on something more productive and turn to tasks that make our lives worth fighting for, worth living.

While I was walking the dog yesterday morning, I spotted the moon low in the southwestern sky. As I stared at it, I saw the full circle even though it wasn’t actually visible to my eye. It made me think of a funny conversation yesterday about being able to see our favorite shows in color on old B/W TV’s. We could fill in the color, just as we can fill in the moon.

We can fill in the future too. It’s there waiting for us after the Pause.

x Robin

Happiness in the Time of Coronavirus