#5 Postcards from Quarantine: Stimulus Check
During this extraordinary time while self-distancing and WFHing, we want to capture the voices around our community in a singular spot.
This quarantine experience has inspired my creative writing muscle, I am being motivated to share my thoughts and emotions to encapsulate this moment and offer encouragement for what’s next.
I will publish blogs as I am stirred to put thought on paper and invite you to read and share them. But it’s not just about me, our social media feeds are full of many voices being published but I can’t keep up.
We invite you to publish your voices here on BrightSpot as a repository of hope. We are looking for encouraging messages and stories to build us up as we seek to rise in these uncertain times.
Simply contact us through our “Contact Form” and let us know you’re interested and we will communicate with you directly. We look forward to hearing from you.
May 5, 2020
Stimulus Check
We moved our daughter out of her college home and into storage as it’s likely she’ll be studying online for the foreseeable future. We stopped at our friend’s house to borrow their truck to help with the move. We showed up in face masks and kept our distance while we visited before heading to our daughter’s college. Our friend’s 80 something-year-old mum, Irene, was there as well and she walked up to us and gave us hugs, without hesitation. She said matter-of-factly that she survived the WWII bombings in London, she would survive a hug.
After we returned the truck later in the day, we stayed for a bit and I had the chance to talk to Irene more about her experience of WWII. She was a child at the time of the bombings and they lost their family home in the bombardment. But they survived as a family. She said during that time strict curfews and social rules were put into place like no lights on after dark. However, they were allowed to convene as normal in groups. She said this Pandemic is a war, albeit different from her experience of WWII, partly because of the isolation and quarantine. It weighs on our human need for touch and connection.
This conversation was fruitful for me because I comprehend we’re living in an historical moment but I am curious how this moment compares to generations before us and their moments in history. WWII is a significant point in history and Irene helped me realize we are standing in the middle of another World War. This time we are not fighting each other rather jointly fighting an invisible invader, one that is stealing our way of life. An invisible enemy that has exposed our vulnerabilities and challenged our resolve as we face adversity on a global scale. And it’s helpful to learn from Irene and others to hear how they worked through adversity to come out the other side victorious.
For many of us, this experience is over-stimulating in how we process change and respond to living with new guidelines and with each other. It is also challenging our livelihoods on many levels. Stimulus is defined in the dictionary as a thing that rouses activity or energy in someone or something, an incentive. I find the term “stimulus check” ironic in that most of us don’t need to be incented to be stimulated at the moment. Rather the term could be “preventive or defensive” as a means to ward off some of the impact of the virus on the economy. The dictionary also defines stimulus as a thing or event that evokes a specific functional reaction in an organ or tissue. This definition is more apt in regards to the response by humanity to the Coronavirus.
If we look at humanity as a collective living body, we realize we have more in common than different with each other around the world. One of those things is how Covid-19 has injured our living body and caused an immune stimulus to fight the viral attack. Like many things in life, the stimulus can have positive and negative effects as our body battles the virus. As scores of healthcare workers fight the see-saw battle of our body’s stimulus to help us heal, scores of others outside of hospitals have been stimulated to respond to caring for our neighbors. As I look to Irene for perspective of what became after WWII, the true underlying connection between now and then is the stimulus of hope. The appreciation for what life is and for what life will be, together again.
Photo by Joanna Kosinska on Unsplash