Circumstances, common sense, and intelligence dictate physically distancing ourselves from each other just now. But there's no health dividend from putting 'tender sympathies' on lockdown.
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We do not only take care of ourselves by holding the line. We also take care of ourselves by shaping edges that allow for the right kinds of movement. Not everything and not indiscriminately. But enough.
There is a quiet, almost mischievous simplicity running through so many of the great wisdom traditions, whether you wander through the teachings of Buddha or Jesus, sit with Laozi, or read someone like Jon Kabat-Zinn. Different languages, different metaphors, different rituals, and yet they keep pointing, again and again, to something almost embarrassingly straightforward.
Let this be for all of it, the seen, the nearly missed, the already vanishing, for the way meaning gathers not in declaration, but in the pause before we turn away, and the small, saving act of looking again.
Wanting steadiness when we feel unsteady is a very reasonable human impulse. But it is worth noticing when that reaching becomes leaning, and when that leaning quietly redistributes authority. Sometimes the signal is obvious. More often, it isn’t.
Our nervous systems are regularly asked to metabolize global crises, geopolitical analysis, moral outrage, economic speculation, and the opinions of several thousand strangers before breakfast. The human nervous system, it turns out, was not originally designed to function as a breaking news ticker.