Category: Empathy

Seeing, Hearing, Understanding

Published on by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

seeing-hearing-machine

I have been close to most of my students but as always happens there have been some with whom my connection was far stronger than with others. One young man in particular appeared to be quite lost and headed for trouble. Seeing his downward trajectory broke my heart because he was incredibly bright and I saw something quite special in him. Over time we spoke often and I encouraged him to create positive goals and to work hard to achieve them.

Life was not easy for the young man. He lived in a rough neighborhood where temptations were a constant. His family struggled just to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. Gangs often approached him in hopes of recruiting him because he was big and muscular and smart. He had already had some brushes with the law before I met him. In many ways he had given up on himself until I interceded. After our talks he began to view himself in more positive ways and as his grades improved he discussed dreams of becoming an engineer. I felt confident that I had played a small role in saving him from the downward pull of the environment in which he had been living but I had underestimated the power of forces that gnawed at him every single day.

Shortly after the Christmas holidays one year a theft occurred at the school. One of the students had lost some electronic gear and he and his parents were quite insistent that it had happened at in one of his classes. The administration did a search and made inquiries all to no avail. I made a plea to all of my students that they do the right thing and help to return the items to the rightful owner. That lead to a tip that broke my heart. The student with whom I had invested so much time and emotion had been seen with the stolen gear.

I did not want to believe that my protege had fallen from grace but I had to interview him to hear his side of the story. At first he concocted several lies but eventually broke down and admitted that he had taken the item and even a few other things that nobody had reported. He was planning to sell them in his neighborhood’s black market. The change he made from such deals provided him and his family with a little bit better life than they might otherwise have had.

To this day my stomach clinches and I want to sob when I think of what happened. I realized in that moment that my student lived in a world that I would never quite understand. I could not justify what he had done and of course I had to report him to the administrators but I was sickened that the progress he had made in redirecting his life had been so suddenly altered. As he sobbed in front of me and proclaimed, “I know you hate me now” I was stunned. Without hesitation I assured him, “I will never hate you. I love you, but I hate what you have done.”

I suppose this is the state of my conflicted emotions during this difficult moment in our nation’s history. I will always love my country and unlike many I will never have thoughts of leaving it because in spite of its flaws it is a great but still imperfect nation. I am willing to see those flaws and know that they are wrong. I dislike them intensely, but not the idea and ideals of America. Being a firm believer in reconciliation I am always willing to forgive but I also know that we must first squarely face problems, admit they are present, and then do our utmost to begin the process of repairing them. To do anything less for our country at this moment in time would be akin to my covering up my beloved student’s infraction, pretending it was not there. It would be the least patriotic thing that I might do.

I was ultimately able to defend my student as someone whom I believed to be innately good and worthy of help, but I made it clear that his actions were wrong. He ultimately returned the stolen items, made restitution and underwent a program of extensive counseling and support. I have not heard from him in many years so I don’t know how things ultimately turned out but I’d like to believe that we somehow saved him from a life that seemed so inevitable back then.  So it is with the United States of America. I believe that we are the good guys but many of us have been lying to ourselves that all is well. We have overlooked problems because they have not affected us personally.

It is quite human to want to avoid conflict particularly when it does not appear to be worth the effort. Some people even endure abusive situations rather than shake up the status quo. The great unknown of change can be frightening and so we fall back on comforting routines. Unfortunately if there are problems they inevitably grow until they can no longer be ignored.

I have been hearing concerns from my Black friends, colleagues and students for decades. At first they were rather quiet and somewhat nervous whispers and like so many I did not take them very seriously because in truth they did not affect my personal life. As time went by they became more and more insistent and so I tried to quell the fears of those who were confiding in me. Before long I began to notice the kind of things that they were telling me. I saw that they were indeed being treated differently than I was only because my skin was white and theirs was black. It made me feel uncomfortable to face that truth but I still felt that there was little more that I might do than to assure them of my love for them. Because nothing was ever really done to address the very real problems that they had described the impact of them became more and more noticeable over time until we finally reached this moment when our country seems to be on fire with rage.

I now see them. I now hear them. I now understand that something must be done but I am filled with fear because somehow the message is being lost in the furor of the moment. I know without a doubt that the looting and the graffiti and the destruction is wrong but those are actions, not the essence of what the vast majority of African Americans are attempting to tell us. I believe with every fiber of my being that in spite of the horrific scenes playing out we must remain calm. We must let our Black brothers and sisters know that we love them. We must begin a dialogue that has been too long in coming. We must join them in the work to bring the change that we need to see in our country.

We can show the true strength of this nation only by using what is best about it. The first amendment is perhaps the most important tool that we have. It assures us that freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, freedom of the press, and the right to petition will be protected. Our goal at this moment should be to use these freedoms to loudly and strongly defend and protect our Black citizens in their cry to be heard.

I long for a leader regardless of party affiliation or economic status to bring calm and comfort to the situation. I long for a leader with a real interest in discussing what needs to be done. We must find such people for surely they are in our midst. We must use the most wonderful tool that we have to bring them to the fore. We must bring them to our aid with our votes. I pray that with that power we will be able to find individuals who are willing to set aside their own agendas to do the work necessary to bring our country to the place where it always should have been. Our votes should be our voices.

 

Fulfilling the Promise of Democracy

Published on by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

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I suspect that we are all on edge these days. With Covid-19 it’s been a tough several weeks and we have so little sense that things will return to normal any time soon. I’ve experienced moments of feeling strong and unstoppable, and times when I felt defeated by all of the illness and death. Mostly I have found myself all too often feeling disappointed in some of the negative attitudes I have witnessed. I’ve tried to concentrate on the mostly good and wonderful things that I have observed but sometimes late at night I have been ground down by a sense of disappointment that anyone would be ugly during such a time as this. I have often shed tears not because of any inconvenience to me but because of the extent to which this virus has caused suffering in the world.

It was within this context that I watched a video of the killing of George Floyd last week. I saw the heartless police officer with his knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck and I could only think the cop appeared to almost take delight in humiliating and harming Mr. Floyd. I felt a flurry of intensely negative emotions that raced from sorrow to anger. When protestors hit the streets in a state of rage I would normally have wanted to instantly chastise them for being so destructive. I am a peaceful person who has always followed the rules. I like order in my life but somehow I found myself understanding how they had reached the end of their patience with a system that has over and over again treated them and their ancestors without human respect. It was as though I too had run out of excuses for racist behavior.

In the days following I slept very little and when I did I kept having vivid dreams of my mother. In them I was desperately attempting to get close to her so that I might be comforted. She would look at me, smile invitingly but somehow there was a barrier between the two of us as though she was reminding me that she had already taught me what I needed to know. I thought of her and my children, grandchildren and former students day and night. I prayed for peace and also some kind of revelation that might help us all. I found it in remembering advice that my mother had given me at the very beginnings of my long career in education.

When I complained to my mama that my students were behind in their learning, often unwilling to do simple homework assignments and sometimes too rowdy for me to convey my lessons her reply was that I needed to figure out what I was doing wrong, not keep focusing on what I thought they were doing wrong. As I pushed back on her insistence that I needed to change she explained that it sounded to her as though my pupils were dealing with difficulties far more pressing to them than completing math practice each evening. She urged me to find out who they were, what bothered them, what excited them. She said that when I demonstrated compassion and a genuine desire to learn about them we would together begin a dialogue that would lead to everyone becoming better. I reluctantly followed her advice because I was desperate to make a difference in their lives. I soon realized that the art of teaching had to be human first.

As I have watched the looting and destruction in our country in the past many days I have been saddened and disturbed because I feel that it may only lead to more misunderstanding of the message I believe most of the protestors are earnestly attempting to convey. I  have worried that the just causes of our forty two million African American citizens are being highjacked by an element that does not truly represent them. I saw many of my white friends becoming increasingly disturbed and I heard the president invoking a position of force to quell the disturbances. I feared that the bad behaviors of the few in this historic moment would become yet another excuse for shutting down the voices of the peaceful  many just.

I thought of the beginnings of my country, a land that I do love, but a nation with ideals that have always been imperfect in their distribution. I know that members of my paternal grandmother’s family where here in the colonies very early on, and some of them chose to fight when the revolution began. Like so many I have tended to romanticize that epic chapter in history but over time I have learned that it was not quite as glorious in every instance as I would like to imagine. Wars are rarely pretty. People die in them. Property is destroyed in them. So too was our American Revolution a horrible time when the colonists must have been terribly divided and hoping to make the violence stop so that they might go back the their normal. While it was a glorious cause it exacted a terrible price for those who endured it.

As long as I live I will never ever understand how anyone could have believed that it was okay to capture, enslave and sell human beings. I’d like to mark it off as just a time when people didn’t know better but I have read too many accounts of brave souls advocating for the abolition of slavery from its very beginnings. Not only did the practice grow like a cancer in the colonies but it was eventually enshrined in the Constitution of the new country. There were a sufficient number of arguments over whether or not slavery should have been allowed for me to realize that we built our first hundred years of existence on a dastardly compromise. We allowed human beings to be bought and sold like livestock and did not even count them as full persons in the prescriptive phrases of the Constitution. Today’s problems were born in that horrific mistake. 

I have spent enough time researching slavery to know about the brutal conditions in which the people lived. The humiliations to which they were subjected were unconscionable and even though I have not yet found any evidence that my ancestors owned slaves I find myself wondering if my relations simply ignored the practice so as not to cause trouble. Somehow it would comfort me to think that maybe one among them was brave enough to speak out against the horror of the practice. 

When Abraham Lincoln finally freed the slaves it took another hundred years to pass legislation that allowed our black brothers and sisters to live among us rather than in segregated neighborhoods. It was not until I was in my teens that they were even allowed to eat in our restaurants, stay in our hotels, used our public facilities, enjoy the same opportunities of education and work that were the taken for granted privileges of my family. Even then there were still Americans who viewed African Americans as inferior beings. Blacks are all too often stereotyped with labels that they do not deserve and try as they may to be part of the American dream even the most successful among them, including the man who became President of the United States, continued to suffer the indignities of racism.

I suppose that there is a breaking point that occurs when an entire group is being abused. There is a moment when one has to say, “Enough!  No More!” The death of George Floyd at the hands of a police officer brought the almost two hundred fifty years of mistreatment boiling to the surface for Blacks in America who are tired of worrying about their safety and the safety of their children. They can no longer simply sit back and accept the tragedies that continue to stalk them no matter how hard they try. Like the Sons of Liberty of old they have cried out against the tyranny that they and their forebears have endured. This time they will be heard just as the patriots of old made their dissatisfaction of the status quo known to the king.

There are those who do not understand the frustration that has led to an eruption of destruction in Minnesota and other parts of the country and yet I suspect that it is something that our Founding Fathers would recognize. Their forays against the British merchants, governors and soldiers were often violent. First person accounts describe how angry colonists would vandalize and loot businesses and then sell the goods that they stole to support their uprisings. When the revolution officially began with gunshots in Concord only about forty percent of the people in what would eventually become the United States supported the philosophies and efforts of the patriots. Many loyalists were harassed and even run out of their homes by the rowdy revolutionaries.

Some of my husband’s kin chose to leave the country for the duration of the battle for independence rather than endure the chaos. Even back then people were quite divided about how to deal with the growing numbers of illegal acts targeting the king and his army. It was a violent and often bloody time that might make most of us uncomfortable if we were to see exactly how things were. Nonetheless the white colonists ultimately gained from the sacrifices that the patriots made but the Blacks did not. They were still in bondage even after our country won its freedom from the British and to this very day they suffer the indignities of discrimination.

We like to think of our nation as one where there is opportunity and freedom and justice for everyone. We have made progress in the almost two hundred fifty years since our country was formed but it must surely be apparent to all good men and women that we are not yet there. It is a struggle that continues to this very day. As we attempt to rid ourselves of the virus of Covid-19 we must be just as diligent in eradicating the virus of prejudice that should have been insisted upon from our country’s beginnings.  The United States of America will not heal and will not be as great as it should be until we break the chains of racism that have tainted all that we were supposed to believe about equality. Until we truly demonstrate our belief that all men and women are created equal with the same rights for all people all of the time we will not have fulfilled the promise of democracy. We will not accomplish this with armies and shows of force but with indications that we are ready to finally listen. 

Doing It Because It Is Kind

Published on by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

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The battles between those who want to wear masks and practice social distancing versus those who demand their right to choose how they will or will not protect themselves from Covid-19 rage on daily. Sadly some of the commentaries have devolved into schoolyard insults and taunts reminiscent of my years as a middle school teacher. While I am willing to accept that people have differing points of view, I can’t quite wrap my head around the behavior of those who shove, spit and threaten anyone who is attempting to follow the recommended and sometimes imposed safety guidelines. What is even more concerning to me are the insinuations that the procedures have only been enacted in order to defame President Trump and lessen his chances of winning the election in November. The chorus of thoughtless chants urging those who are” scared” to just stay home has irked me beyond my ability to continue to ignore them. Instead I feel more and more compelled the issue.

Let us suppose that there is a woman who faithfully goes to work each day to support her family. She has children who have not been in school for some time that she leaves in the care of her husband who lost his job in late February. Sadly he worked in the oil and gas industry tanked just at the moment when the pandemic reached worldwide proportions. It is now up to the woman to keep food on the table and pay the bills. She is quietly stoic as the world appears to be crumbling around her. She doesn’t sleep well at night and conditions at work do little to lessen her anxieties. 

Unfortunately the woman has a number of underlying health issues that worry her, so she wears a mask to work and brings gloves to use when she comes in contact with things that others may have also touched. She keeps disinfectants in her desk for when she must use the office bathroom. She is exceedingly careful because she knows that if she gets sick with Covid-19 her family will be in impossibly dire straits. She does not have the luxury of taking risks.

The other people in her office have become convinced that the whole pandemic is a hoax cooked up by fake new and democrats. They gather together in groups without regard to social distancing, never wearing  masks or gloves. They often disregard the woman’s obvious attempts to limit contact with others by getting way too close when they come into her office or pass her in the hall. They bring members of their family with them to the work making the environment even more crowded than it should be. They  leave during the work day to eat lunch in restaurants or to run errands at the mall. They boast that when they can get away with it they toss their masks aside. They look at the woman wearing her mask as though she is a silly goose, a paranoid mindless sheep.

The woman knows how her fellow workers feel and sometimes wonders if she is indeed paranoid. Then she thinks about her situation and sticks with her determination to be safe. Not only does she have underlying health problems but so does her husband and one of her children. She is also caring for elderly parents. She knows that she has to be vigilant.

The woman wishes that her coworkers, her boss,  and the rest of the people around her were taking Covid-19 more seriously because she is genuinely worried and realizes that nobody who is boasting about being unafraid is going to help her if she does somehow get sick. She is on her own.

She hears the people in her office chattering about the push to extend unemployment benefits beyond July. They sound like parrots as they insist that doing such a thing will only encourage people to stay home rather than accept a job and go back to work. She wonders where all of these jobs that will be offered to people like her husband will come from. He has been spending many hours every single day for almost three months now searching for work. So far he has had only one interview for a position thousands of miles away. In a normal time people would be recruiting him. Now he struggles to find anything and knows that he is competing with thousands when he does find a match to his degree and his experience. 

The woman sits quietly in her office faithfully completing her work and feeling profoundly sad that there are people who have taken the liberty of misinterpreting the situations of countless Americans rather than attempting to understand them. She has no problems with the idea of opening up country but she would like to see it done in a way that does not cause her so much worry. If only they would wear masks when they are all gather together or when they went out in public. It is such a little thing to request, not all that inconvenient.

She feels so very alone as the office sounds as though it is the site of a party. She knows that the others think she is strange. She actually hopes that they are right that we will all be fine, but something tells her that they are wrong. She has to pray that God will protect her in spite of the risky behaviors of her colleagues. She is the last hope for her family and the July deadline of increased unemployment benefits for her husband is on its way. She cannot get sick!

I do not understand why people find conforming to the needs of the common good to be so contemptible. Why are there so many inaccurate and judgemental conclusions being drawn about those who want to be precautious? Why can’t we Americans come together in a sense of compassion and responsibility? Social distancing and mask wearing are not tyrannical attempts to deny us of our basic rights. They are an effort to protect one another. While they may be imperfect methods for making us safe, they are better than doing nothing at all.

As we go to work, walk through stores, go back to old routines we should bear in mind that there are many people like my hypothetical woman. They desperately need kindness and a sense that people care enough about them to make an effort to keep them safe. Honor them by cheerfully wearing a mask and staying six feet away at all times. Don’t make fun of their precautions. They know best what they need.  Sometimes we must look beyond our own horizons and take action not because it is defined or undefined in the Constitution, but because it is the kind thing to do. 

He Was Essential

Published on by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

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In this time of Covid-19 I have found myself thinking of my paternal grandfather, Paul Ulrich, more and more often. He came to the United States on a steamer from Germany around 1912. I never got to meet him because he died at a rather young age a few months before I was born. What little I know of him is garnered from stories from my mother and a cousin who was old enough to have actually met him. I have always wanted to know more about him and painting a picture of him is almost akin to putting together an all red jigsaw puzzle. I’ve had to infer a great deal but I’ve also found documents and scraps of evidence that tell the truth of the kind of person he was.

According the family memories much of the work that he did was typical of immigrants even to this very day. He spent time working on a big farm near what is now the Houston Ship Channel and doing lumbering work in the Beaumont area. Eventually he got a job at the Houston Meat Packing Company that operated on Navigation Street just east of downtown Houston. His job was to clean the area where the butchering of the carcasses took place. It was backbreaking work that bore heavily on his health. My mother often spoke of how her father’s legs were riddled with varicose veins so painful that he had to wrapped them in bandages before going to his job each day. In spite of the hardships his children always boasted that he never missed a single day of work until he suffered a cerebral hemorrhage that ultimately lead to his death at the age of sixty five.

I have been reading a great deal about the outbreaks of the coronavirus in meat packing plants across the United States. The essential workers there are on the front line of keeping the supply chain of meat products moving to supermarkets across the country. Sadly conditions in those places have lead to contagion on a massive scale. It is as though the environment of a typical meat packing production line is the perfect place to incubate a virus. The process requires workers to perform their duties without benefit of social distancing in very cold temperatures. Without proper protective gear such places have become like petri dishes for growing Covid-19, making the carrying out the duties one of the single most dangerous jobs in terms of contracting the virus.

As I have heard about the numbers of illnesses and deaths associated with meat packing and Covid-19 I have thought back to my own grandfather who was so much like the people who today work in such places. It is a job that has brutal effects on the body even in good times. During a pandemic it is dangerous, and yet we expect to see our grocery stores filled with our favorite cuts of meat without much thought of the people who are responsible for processing the products. They are all too often simply faceless persons, numbers on a data sheet that mean little to us. I suppose that because my grandfather was once one of them I find myself wondering who they are and how they are doing. My guess is that missing work is out of the question for them just as it was for my grandfather. They not only lose income whenever they are absent but in all probability they will be replaced if they choose not the be present too often.

We take so many of our remarkable resources for granted until they are not available and then we fret and complain, rarely thinking of the people who have been delivering our goods to us. We want whatever we want even as we shelter safely in our homes. The inconveniences bother us and we tend not to associate the hardships of others with our own personal needs. It’s natural to take things for granted when they have always seemed to be there. Ours is a land of plenty that is often the marvel of people the world over. Suddenly the smooth functioning of our systems is struggling to keep up with demands and it is as novel and frightening as the virus itself.

I don’t think that we always fully understand or appreciate the contributions of every person involved in the supply chain of goods and services in our world. We don’t see the long process that brings what we desire to our homes. We don’t think of the slaughter houses or the assembly lines or the person who cleans up the leftover entrails and blood. It’s difficult to imagine how grueling such jobs would become after performing them day after day. Many like my grandfather spend their entire adult lifetimes engaged in what must be terribly unsatisfying and difficult labor.

My grandfather was a collector of books. Each Friday after being paid his wages he would visit a bookstore where he purchased a new volume that he would read in the evenings. His interests were in science, mathematics, agriculture. I learned from perusing a box of old paperwork that he had once purchased land in Richmond, Texas. He told one of my cousins that he hoped to retire and create a farm there. The deed for the property was among the receipts but somewhere along the way, no doubt from necessity, he had to sell the acreage and along with it his dream.

My grandfather was not particularly respected in his neighborhood. He was an immigrant who spoke English with an accent. He had eight children crowded into a tiny house and he never made much money. Some people assumed that they knew him. They even went so far as to say that he and his family were dirty and uneducated and low status. They did not see that he was a man who worked dutifully every single day. He paid his bills, owned his home and died without a single debt in the world. His house was lined with the bookshelves filled with volumes that he had read. He was so much more than just someone who cleaned up a sickening mess over and over again. He was an essential worker in our society, and now because of Covid-19 we should all understand how important he was.

An Introvert’s Covid 19 Story

Published on by Sharron BurnettLeave a comment

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I’m a bonafide ninety ninth percentile introvert according to a test I once took. I didn’t argue with the results or the explanation because the comments appeared to be right on target when they came to describing me. The analysis made a point of explaining that my introversion has nothing to do with a dislike of people but rather a preference for how to recharge my emotions. In other words I’m a people person who sometimes needs to retreat from human contact for a time just to ease the stresses of living. When times get tough I prefer a quiet weekend inside the comfort and privacy of my home, alone with my thoughts rather than sharing them in a large group in public. Our tendencies toward introversion or extraversion are mostly determined by the extent to which we feel better in a serene understated setting or one that is filled with people and excitement. In my case I unwind best with a walk alone in an empty forest or snuggled in a blanket on my couch with a good book.

Once we introverts are feeling calm once again, which rarely takes more that a few hours or days to accomplish, we are fully able to return to the crowds and the noise and actually enjoy our interactions with the world. Our feelings for the people around us are often even stronger than those of our seemingly differently wired extrovert friends who find so much joy and comfort in raucous gatherings after a long week of work. Perhaps it is our intensely deep feelings for the humans around us that are at the root of our need to step back into our little cocoons now and again. We are often empathetic to a fault. We notice those who are hurting with little more than a glance at the pain in their eyes and then worry about them until we are assured that they will be okay.

As an introvert I tend to be content with little more than observing the birds in my backyard or time spent writing in my front room where I can hear the children playing in my neighborhood. So when we were asked to isolate ourselves in our homes for a time to prevent the spread of Covid-19 I believed that I had been preparing for such an eventuality for my entire life. It seemed as though being confined to my quarters would be an intensely pleasurable experience and one that would lead me to a kind of self healing of the soul that would feel luxurious. Sadly I did not count on the longings for purpose and social interaction that have always defined me. I did not seem to understand that my introversion is a healing mechanism, not a lifestyle.

At first I felt rather joyful staying home. After all I have virtually anything a person might want to keep myself busy and entertained. My husband Mike is my very best friend and I enjoy my conversations with him. We have food in our pantry, books on our shelves, flowers in our garden and interests to keep us occupied. I’m not someone who cares much about food so I honestly don’t miss eating out. I suppose I could go the rest of my life without entering a restaurant and be just fine. I used to enjoy shopping as a kind of sport but it does not give me the thrill that it once did. I can enjoy a movie as much and perhaps even more in my living room than at a theater. I politely put up with sports but don’t really miss them now that they are gone.

Nonetheless after many weeks of staying home I find myself longing to get back out into the swim of things while hearing people say that I am part of a group that should continue to maintain my now self imposed isolation. I sense that my patience with this situation is wearing thin and in that realization I see more and more clearly the true meaning of my introversion because what I long for most are intimate gatherings with my family and friends. I can see them on Zoom conferences or with a FaceTime call but I really want to hug them and see their faces. Just sitting next to them without saying a word would be glorious.

If things were still normal and Covid-19 had not entered my life I would have been as busy as the bees that flit around my yard. By now I would have spent time in the mountains of Colorado with my brothers and sisters-in-law. I would have celebrated with my grandsons on Aggie ring day and attended parties for a number of young people who are graduating from high school or college or medical school. I’d be packing and preparing for a grand tour of Scotland with a Rice professor as my guide. I’d be excited about taking our trailer out for camping trips and counting the days until the Elton John concert for which I snared tickets back in November of 2019. I would have gone to see my aunt on her one hundred first birthday and I’d get to spend time chatting for hours over lunch or dinner with friends. I would get to be with my mathematics students when I teach them the fundamentals of arithmetic and Algebra. I would sit inside my church again smiling and embracing the lovely people that I are there each Sunday. I would be out and about in my bustling city grumbling about the traffic but secretly enjoying that I live in a place so vibrant and filled with life.

I miss all of that so very much and I wonder when I will be able to feel safe enough again to join the world around me without a mask or gloves or hand sanitizer or disinfectant wipes. I have grown weary of feeling a profound sense of worry about the physical and economic health of the world. I sense an almost tectonic shift in the routine ways of doing things that is shaking all of us to our very core. I long for normal even as I fear that I will have to redefine what that means. I want to believe that we will be able to come together to make positive changes that will make the world an even better version of itself than it was before Covid-19.

On some days I am filled with optimism and on others I grieve. Perhaps my introverted tendencies are too much with me. I am overthinking and instead of comforting me, those thoughts sometimes lead me to conclusions that are terrifying. I see us humans attempting to avoid truths by showering ourselves with superficialities, but thankfully I also see instances of profound compassion and sacrifice. My hope lies in the prayer that we will ultimately make our way through all of this but this time we will watch and learn how to build a better world.

When the dust settles I will cast aside my self imposed shackles and literally dance back into the flow of life. I will be everywhere with everyone. I’ll still be an introvert at heart but I will grab the world with everything that I’ve got.