Corona Diaries: My Re-Discovery of Meaning

The incoming, unpredictable tides shift the sandy grains of my mind. One moment I'm feeling as if I can do this, and a few moments later it's as if the shutdown shutting me down.

Such is my daily grind in recent weeks. I haven't felt like writing, and the creative juices have tasted mostly bitter, if even present at all.

I have had to mind my mood, but most days it feels like my mood is minding me. It's temperamental and petulant, impulsive and unpredictable. Just when I feel like I'm getting a grip, a wave of je ne sais quoi hits me and the relentless tide is pulling me out to stormy seas. And trust me, these seas are rough.

I wonder why I can't get a hold of myself, why I can't navigate these waters. After all, I understand mental health. I have fairly good coping skills and decent spiritual practices. I have dedicated most of my life to helping others navigate difficult times. So why can't I tame these lions roaring in my soul?

I am fairly convinced these lions don't want to be tamed. They prefer to roam my inner savanna, preying on my emotional vulnerability, devouring any mental stability.

Fifty-seven days into stay-at-home I'm basically just as mystified by this experience as I was at the beginning. What is going on? I ask myself. I feel frustrated and cantankerous--and this is on the better days. On the bad ones, keep your distance!

I've self-diagnosed myself with Pandemic Personality Disorder. I'm not sure who I am when I wake up or what day it is.  (To be clear, I lost the day of the week around Day 11, and I'm pretty sure, my solid sense of self around Day 18.)

One's interior world can be a dicey game. It takes exceptional coping skills to bounce back from the barrage of daily Twitter tirades, Facebook rants, media spin, and the mindless malaise that consumes most our days.

Mainly, we've lost our markers. We've lost our syncopated rhythm of life.  We can't gather for holidays, birthday celebrations, dinner parties, religious services, or nights-out-on-the-town. This loss of meaningful interactions is causing our souls to wander and wane.

Interiority longs for meaning, and the normal rites and rituals that produce meaning have been stripped of us. So we feel a profound loss, even though we can't always readily identify exactly what that loss is.

Psychologists call this ambiguous loss, the loss that occurs when we are denied a normal sense of ending, closure or resolve. We search for answers, and they are denied us. The longing and searching that results from ambiguous loss make us very, very weary.

The Irish poet John O'Donohue writes, When weariness becomes gravity, it destroys your natural soul protection. He says we become like Sisyphus of the underworld: condemned to an eternity of rolling the huge boulder up the hill, only to have it slip and come crashing back down, then doomed to repeat it again.

This weight of weariness has chipped against our natural soul protection. That's a big part of what we are feeling. We've lost some of our soul armor. It's been chipped away as the days melt into weeks, the weeks melt into months.

So I've set out to combat said weariness and fortify the walls of my inner castle. I've been giving back where I can: donating to food banks, delivering hot meals to shut-ins, and providing telephonic support to elders who are isolated home alone.

I am meditating more--sometimes with music, other times with a guided podcast.  I'm finishing the stack of unread books on the nightstand that have been beckoning the last year. I continue checking in with family and friends in urban as well as rural areas, because those in the heartland increasingly realize that what has faced us in NYC may now be lying in wait at their doorstep.

All this provides me meaning and the unexpected benefit of getting me out of my head.

In short, I've decided to make myself available--more available for service, support, and hopefully, some substance. Perhaps unlike Sisyphus, I can choose to not push that boulder up the hill. I can put down the weight of weariness by doing something different, creating meaningful moments on days threatened by meaningless. 

Today I awoke with the usual existential dread, but it rolled away as I moved about. Life wasn't as heavy as it was the day before. It awakened with new meaning.