Pivot 52: Bask in that feeling of loving others

Yesterday was a day of two ‘episodes in the time of coronavirus’.

Episode One – 12 noon: my Government permitted daily walk

A beautiful walk in the sunny woods, working that idea of ‘seeing the solution on the horizon’, playing the actor who knows the Good iOS is downloading, relishing the perfect beauty of the sun bouncing through the leaf-budding branches. I listened to a superb talk by Abraham-Hicks on seeing yourself through the eyes of your inner being. (“Your Inner Being says ‘I like to love.’) It made me want to ask my Inner Being, holder of all my inmost desires, what it knew about my true wishes. Oh wow, when the voice started to come through (“You wish …xyz, abc, rst…”) it so made me laugh – talk about having your secret hopes brought forth to the glaring light of day. So revealing. And clearly, some of the things I’m currently diligently ‘working on’ are not even actually what I really want…!

I won’t share those telling Inmost Desires here – except to add how very much I clearly cherish this space, and how important the theme of dialogue is to me. And a little about how I’d love to travel. But, I do want to note that dialoguing with the part of you that knows your Inmost Desires is an excellent exercise in self-knowing! Once you get your Inmost Desires out on the table, you can start to chew them over, play with them, dance with them, be tickled by them. There’s no need for resistance, or… duty. It’s about trusting that our happiest Inmost Desires are expressions of our soul’s mission, and therefore not to be bottled up or denied or repressed. This is information I would really, really like to absorb.

Episode Two – 4pm: Sobbing in the supermarket.

We were getting low on some food items. I hadn’t been to the shops since way before lockdown and all the accompanying televised scenes of supermarket panic-buying of loo rolls and hand sanitiser. A couple of weeks at least. G suggested maybe I’d like to get out, and maybe go to the bigger supermarket to get a few things we all like. We had actually, between the three of us at home, compiled quite a list of things we’d like from the next shopping trip.

Inside, I was saying “NO! We don’t need these things. Let’s do without and run down our supplies further. It’s risky out there! Or at least, let’s do a dash in to a small shop for a couple of essentials, but otherwise use up stuff in the freezer for meals. And also, why don’t you want to go? Is it dangerous, and you’re sending my into the lion’s den for your own protection?! I don’t want to go out there. I’ve diligently kept myself free of this virus thing – I don’t want to put myself at risk now. I don’t want to die of this thing…!” As you can see, there was a lot arising in me. So much for seeing the Good iOS on the horizon! Anyway, I didn’t say this out loud. G sensed my trepidation and offered to drive us and wait for me in the carpark.

Again, part of me was wondering, how could he just drop me off in the infection zone and stay safely in the car?!  But then, maybe it was my turn to run the gauntlet, I acknowledged solemnly to myself. In the car, to try and clear myself of this fear, I turned off the radio programme (on the dangers of not social distancing), and I asked G why he didn’t want to come in with me. He explained it was simply because he understood we needed to limit the number of people in the supermarket – that’s why he wasn’t suggesting we went in together. Ah, ok, that figures.

We arrived at Sainsbury’s car park. There were barriers to channel what must have been queues earlier in the day. Posters plastered on the windows insisted ‘only 1 adult per shopping trip’. Ah, ok, I admitted to myself, they really do want to limit people in there. And it’s my turn. I gathered the shopping bags and some clinical wipes for the trolley handle and headed in, leaving G in the car.

I can’t describe how weird and dystopian it was in Sainsbury’s. On the one hand, there was the familiarity of being greeted by the voguing mannequins and ‘seasonal gifts’. On the other hand, a warmly-voiced announcement echoed overhead, soothly requesting that customers “stay 2 metres apart from each other, for the safety of everyone”. We customers all wove about the aisles to avoid each other, like polite, trolley-wielding dancers at a Regency ball. Except of course, the large man who breathily leant across my face to pick himself something from the shelf I was looking at. I recoiled and held my breath. Maybe it was just better not to breathe deeply until I got out, but I had this huge shopping list, and G and A were anticipating all this good stuff… It was going to take a while. I clutched the damp hand sanitiser cloth harder and rubbed it into my palms.

Maybe some 5 minutes in, I reached out for some coriander – coriander for heavens’ sake – and felt my head start to spin. It was clearly too much. The weirdness, the alienation from fellow humans, the shrinking from each other, the sense of the invisible threat, the complete normality melded with futuresque sci-fi horror film. The tears started to well up. ‘Let them through’, I thought. I’ve plenty of practice crying my way through sensory overload in public places. I think it was spotting the young shop worker, quietly restocking the salad shelf, that finished me. Here I was, reeling with the imagined risk of being in this strange public space for half an hour, and there was this young man just immersed in it all day long, taking the risk for his own economic security and for our collective ability to feed ourselves. Tears poured down my face and I felt close to fainting.

I pulled my trolley to one side and slumped over it. I hoped this would all pass. But it didn’t. It dawned on me that, while I might not mind people seeing me in an emotional meltdown, people might think I was rapidly coming down with ‘something’, and that wasn’t fair on them. Reluctantly, I called G and asked him to accompany me. Bless him, he whizzed right in, took the trolley and gave me the keys to go and sit in the car. Which I did. And where I wailed. And wailed.

I think I had become protected from the reality of it all by staying at home so diligently, and this was my first venture out. The strangeness of the outside world was shocking – the roads so empty too, and driving passed the shops and restaurants all dark and shut up like a Sunday in the eighties.  It is not the world we lived in two weeks ago – and why? Because of a pandemic. It’s mind-boggling. A dam of concern, grief, shock and bewilderment burst in my venturing out. I am in awe of our key workers. I am humbled to the ground by our hospital workers saving the lives of people with the disease – working 12 hour shifts with inadequate PPE (personal protective clothing).

Help me sit with this today, please. Help me make meaning of this, please. What am I to learn, to do, to absorb? How can I make my participation in this historic event more than just diligently ‘staying inside’?

There was a word which spoke deeply to you in a tweet you read the other day. What was it? 

Dedication.

Hang on. Let me find it.

Hm… the word ‘dedication’ is not written here, but exemplified…

Hats of to iranian doctor
"Shirin Rohani" who passed away due to #CoronavirusPandemic due to lack of medical staff she keep treating coronavirus patients till her last breath. Look closely she herself is on the IV while treating patients.
She would be remembered. #Covid_19 pic.twitter.com/NJPk8FthuV

— Nayyar Abbass (@AbMeriSun0) March 23, 2020

Or possible, it was this one <3:

https://twitter.com/Moku_O_Keawe/status/1242158900666716160

Heck, man. It just drains you of life force to contemplate the nobility of what these doctors and nurses are doing. Handing over their lives for the sake of others. For the sake of strangers.

Yesterday, I started reading a book (yes, reading an actual book! Poetry speed is coming back,..) I’ve had on the shelf for over a year:

What is it about the startling dedication of these doctors?

The Inner Being says, “I like to love. I love to feel love flowing through me. That’s what I do best. That’s what I enjoy more than anything.” There is no greater act of love than to relieve suffering. Do you see? 

Yes. I believe I do. And that explains why I enjoy training less than I do mediating!! Because my training is ‘in-theory’ learning for participants so that they might relieve the hypothetical suffering of hypothetical others, maybe, in the hypothetical future. In mediating, you are actively relieving suffering on the spot from the moment you say ‘tell me about what’s happened so far’ – which, I now gather, is what the Inner Being loves to do.

And the word ‘dedication’?

Bask in that feeling of loving others

#FOLO