8:30 AM: I'm on the phone with my parents, doing my best not to audibly hyperventilate in a Starbucks bathroom. Change, unknowns, current and future stressors feel like a typhoon crashing against the bamboo shelter of my soul.
Moments, minutes, hours later, my premeditated typhoon is nothing more than a ripple in otherwise calm waters. You'd think that I would learn. You would think that the next ripple wouldn't fill me with dread at its approach, but it does. Because what if this is the one that packs enough punch to knock me over?
Fast-forward exactly one week. I'm blogging these thoughts from a quarantined apartment. Fragility is the front page of every newspaper, the headlining comment of every conversation. It is the topic of my internal monologue on the potential rebirth of a planet after a cataclysmic event while I walk around the block for fresh air, and for the first time in a long time, I see no one - no cars, no children on the playground across the train tracks, no one. Just me and the late flakes of spring break snow.
And yet, in the fragility, there is an iron-wrought spine holding my shoulders straight and head high. In a day, free from the script of work and imagined social responsibility, there is still quiet prayer, loud prayer, laughing prayer, singing, questioning, wondering...moments, minutes, hours alone with the Creator God of the universe. That is security, a sense of normalcy, in a world that would love to break her neck in an attempt to twist upside-down in slow motion.
7:30 PM: I'm on the floor of my kitchen, doing my best to remember today has been a day. Not a week. Everything on the quarantine checklist doesn't need to be marked off yet. Today has been a day. Tomorrow will hopefully be another one. And maybe, after a while, this, like so many things, will be something we all move forward from.
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