Everyone is touched in some way by this pandemic and the resulting Safer at Home orders. Everything is cancelled or interrupted. Almost everything that used to be distributed across many parts of our local communities has been crammed into our homes.
Homes have become satellite schools, outposts of work, tiny church worship sites, centers for entertainment as well as the local restaurant, ice cream shop, and coffee shop. Some homes have become hair salons and those that haven't are looking more and more like something out of the 1970's, but with internet. And oh yes, I almost forgot, homes are for families too.
And for some people, while everything is happening at home, it is happening at home - alone. Home is the center of all activity while also being the fortress of solitude. Home alone can feel lonely when everything but relationships can happen there.
So much of everyday life has been compressed into the tiny boxes of our homes. And all of this because of a virus we cannot see, hear, smell, taste, or touch. Living such a compressed life in such a confined space leaves more scarce the resources of home for doing what home does best - being a home. It seems everything wants a piece of home these days.
Compression such as this can lead to elevated stress for individuals and for relationships. As the pressure mounts, people tend to get uncomfortable. Sustain discomfort or perhaps even suffering for too long and people start looking to resolve the problem. In general, there are three ways to respond to the mounting stress people experience. Two of these three ways are easy to do, but end up making things worse. One of these responses is much more difficult, but results in good for self and for others.
Act out.
One of the ways people try to resolve their chronic stress is by acting out. Rage Against the Machine. Vent. Look for someone, anyone to blame. Find a whipping boy and whip away. This response to stress is to take out the discomfort on another. It is an attempt to resolve one's own discomfort by transferring it to someone else. The problem is that the transfer never really happens. What happens instead is the discomfort meant to go from one person to another stays with the one person while grows and spreads to others. It is stress contagion not stress transfer.
Act in.
Another way people try to resolve their chronic stress is to swallow it whole and hope to digest it slowly. Denial. Repression. Dismissal. Throw it into the iron box in the corner of the mind and hope it doesn't crawl out. This kind of acting in often results in problems. Anxiety. Insomnia. Depression. Eating Disorders. Throw that discomfort into the iron box and it can crawl out as a monster. Acting in doesn't work any better than acting out. Paradoxically, the end result of acting in is increased stress to self and others.
Grow up.
A third way to respond that is neither acting out nor acting in is growing up. Now, this is not me shouting out how immature everyone is who feels discomfort. Not at all. Instead it is humble recognition that we all have some growing up to do.
Growing up involves being emotionally honest while not being emotionally owned. Being honest with your emotions means acknowledging all the feelings while also being honest enough to recognize that these feelings are information with varying degrees of accuracy. We are honest enough not to rely on emotions as the sole source of truth.
Growing up also means acceptance. There are some things in life that can be changed and some things that can't. For example, no one can change a pandemic no matter how they try. Coming to acceptance about the situation we find ourselves in, after attending to emotions, is part of growing up.
Growing up also means being creative, inventive, and maybe even a little subversive. It means surveying that which cannot be changed and make some new or creative use of it. So, we cannot end the pandemic by force of will, but we can create humor, new patterns of living, new traditions, new memories, new goals. In light of the thing we can't do anything about we can do things we would have never thought of - by growing up.
Growing up does not act out and rage against the machine, but reaches out to connect. Growing up does not act in, but searches within reflecting on purpose and meaning. Growing up creates something new that is good for self and others.