Living My Best Life
Living My Best Life: April 15, 2020
The most helpful pandemic-related reading I’m doing is Dr. Craig Smith’s daily updates to the Columbia (NY) Department of Surgery. He offers a clear-eyed assessment, neither amplifying nor sugar coating the pandemic’s severity, while insisting on humanity’s ability and fortitude to rise to this occasion. He’s a marvelous writer, sprinkling in Dante one day and Greek mythology the next. And on April 8th he quoted COVID-victim and one of my heroes, John Prine, “The scientific nature of the ordinary man / Is to go out and do the best you can.”
So much of what has made shelter-in-place bearable is everyone trying to do the best they can. People are connecting with generosity and compassion and with fewer political memes and jokes-at-the-expense-of. I have friends who are sending poetry and daily concerts and happy pictures out into the world. Our neighborhood garden club mowed paths into the wetland park, created a scavenger hunt, and hid plastic bunnies for kids to find and keep.
At our house we’ve put teddy bears in our windows and most days I’ve chalked a this-or-that question at the bottom of our driveway. I leave some hand sanitizer in the chalk bowl and by the end of the day there are usually 10-12 votes. The most decisive was dog vs cat. But then, I guess people aren’t out walking their cats.
Emma wanted to give away some stickers, so we put them, along with a few books, into the Little Free Library right near our house. Inside there was a brand-new Chunky Monkey Business game with a note on it that read: “We love this game so much we went out and bought another copy to share with the neighborhood! Please take and enjoy for a few days and then if you’d be so kind, return it for others to try.” We loved it, too! I ordered a new neighborhood copy, added to the original note, and it was gone the next day. I love that.
Our family of 5 people includes two adults learning to teach online, two children learning to learn online, and me. For the most part we—and our internet—have done pretty well. In the interest of sanity and camaraderie, at week one I declared that 4:30 marked the end of the work- and school-day and the beginning of Family Fun Time.
Each person plans and executes the 30-minute Family Fun Time once per week. My first Tuesday I introduced improv skits. We’ve played board games and extreme croquet, gone on bike rides and walks, planted seeds and learned some dance moves. I knew a lot of the dances from work celebrations. Of my twenty or so colleagues, I’m the only white person. I recently reminded the Executive Director of this but he countered, “Naw, Julia, you’re family. You’re just a light-skinned sister.” True. Unfortunately, I still dance like a white girl. You could safely conclude that our family versions of the Wobble or the Cupid Shuffle differ from, let’s say, the originals.
At work, whenever something is difficult or we hear terrible news or something feels insurmountable someone will say, “God is good” and everyone else chimes back, “All the time.” It’s a balm and a prayer, a confession of faith and a trust in the moral arc of the Universe. Anglican readers might say, “The Lord be with you” and others respond, “And also with you.” Same same.
God is Good, All the Time is neither a shallow platitude nor resignation. This is not the politician’s milquetoast ‘thoughts and prayers’ in the face of school shootings. It is shared acknowledgement of these two things: 1) humans are not in control, and 2) nothing can separate us from the love of God. It is acknowledgment that humans contribute to suffering and evil in the world, AND it is determination that we humans will work to alleviate that suffering and evil the best we can.
During the day I’ll often go outside to have a bit of alone time, and I’ve found myself staring at the trees and the sky, waving to the many people walking, jogging, strolling, biking. Even when I have a book in my lap I’m rarely reading. Watching the trees leaf out and azaleas exploding as a pandemic sweeps the globe has me pondering Life.
Life, for me, is another name for God. Relentless, using every opportunity for growth and change. When I feel God as personal and invested in the particular, I feel like God is watching me watch the world and asking, “I wonder what Julia will do with this?” And in my best moments I’m watching the world and asking, “What would you have me do?”
A physical law of the universe (the Universe—every speck of star dust and every black hole and every frozen drop of water and every gas giant…not to mention my snoring dog and the blazing irises and the peeping frogs) is that energy is conserved. Nothing is ever wasted. All new growth comes from the decay of something else. Everything is reused and becomes something new, and if we can take our value judgment hats off, we see that this conservation is a beautiful, relentless YES to life. The spider and beetle become the spring peeper. Spring peeper dying to become the soil that nurtures the next beetle. A constant tango of relentless life.
In the midst of this glory of Spring and the generosity of neighbors, we’ve also received a diagnosis of colon cancer for my husband. My healthy as a horse, larger than life, can’t stop Superman husband. After a few anxious weeks of waiting and testing, the doctor scheduled surgery for April 27th.
I was sitting on the front porch, the only quiet place I could find just then, absorbing this challenging news. In my head, John Prine and Bonnie Raitt were singing “just give me one thing that I can hold onto/to believe in this living is just a hard way to go” when a family swept past on bicycles.
The mother yelled back to her small son, “Are you living your best life?”
“Yes!” he whooped back. “Living my best life!”
“How about you?” she asked the toddler in the dad’s bike trailer. They turned the corner before I could hear the answer. But we know the answer. It might as well have been Jesus on those bikes. Maybe it was.
I was convicted, again, with the knowledge that happiness and joy are not external accomplishments. They are choices. Moment by moment choices of how to approach and respond to this life. We cannot stay the same—we are changing nanosecond by nanosecond. And yet we are exactly the same—we are the essence of God, the relentless Life of God pulsing through our lives and the matter of this vast, glorious Universe.
Mark will be in the hospital 3-4 days. That’s about the time South Carolina’s COVID cases are expected to peak. There will probably be chemo and radiation to follow. We feel scared and mortal. And we feel well loved and supported.
God is Good. All the Time
