As our new reality adds limitations to daily life, it can be tempting to be frustrated by what we can’t do. We can’t gather in large groups. We can’t go to the library. We can’t do a lot of things. One can get a headache thinking about all the limitations. However, limitations can be a wonderful opportunity for creativity, reinvention, and more focused thinking on what really matters.
Back in the days when I had access to cable, my favorite channel was Food Network. I just loved all the competition shows: Iron Chef, Chopped, Cupcake Wars, and Cutthroat Kitchen. My favorite thing about watching these shows was seeing how the limitations of the competition would inspire creativity. Outside of a cooking competition, who would make a dessert out of broccoli? Or use pickles in cupcakes? Competition cooking is all about having the art and science of cooking mastered so well that limitation becomes an opportunity to invent instead of following recipes strictly. Consider the current situation as an opportunity for creativity, for taking the usual recipes for doing things and reinventing them. What they don’t show on camera in the cooking competitions, of course, is what a mess the kitchens are afterward and how much work it is to clean up—reinventing things can be a messy and exhausting process—but sometimes it can be worth the time. What can you do with the resources at hand? In the Chopped basket of life, we have all been handed social distancing right now and a few other ingredients particular to us to make something with. Your challenge: to craft a way of life that depends not on familiar recipes and customs, but on the deeper values and principles that matter most to you. The old recipes are still good, the old customs still comforting, but they are not the end goal of either cooking or life. When my aunt and grandmother make the Ukrainian dishes from the old country, the point isn’t the food produced, amazing as it is: it’s about the family bonds that have formed over decades and generations of making those recipes. Even when we cannot gather to do that, we can still honor the point of the exercise by calling each other to keep that bond alive. For every face-to-face custom or habit that you normally have but cannot do right now, there is a principle that goes deeper than the thing itself that can still be honored in some way. (And if it didn’t have a good purpose, maybe it needed to go anyway.) I would like to challenge you to think creatively about how to honor those principles in this improvisational opportunity we’ve all been given, so that when we get back to a more familiar recipe-based rhythm of life, those old recipes are even more meaningful than they were before.
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Some of you are busier than ever right now. The changes and disruptions are giving you extra work, having your kids home is demanding an enormous amount of your attention, and, students, you are having to study extra hard on your own in the absence of face-to-face study groups for finals.
It may not feel like it, but right now, you’re the lucky ones. You’re too busily focused on the task at hand to let your mind wander at random to its various anxieties or to nervously check the news every five minutes. To this group, all I have to say about keeping your mind occupied is this: Keep it balanced. Don’t forget you need to stop to eat, sleep, exercise, and breathe every once in a while. We’ll talk more about that stuff in coming days. The group this article is really about are those who suddenly find an awful lot of time on their hands that they’re not used to. I’m talking about the students who are home on vacation, the recent telecommuters who no longer have hours of their day eaten up with driving (yay!), and especially those who live alone and usually deal with it by being out and about with others. For my fellow Seventh-day Adventists, this group includes almost all of us every Sabbath in the near future, so I will address that in an article of its own later on. Depending on your personality and circumstances, this extra time will either feel amazing or terrible at first. Under ordinary conditions, our culture values busyness at the expense of a lot of important things like health, family time, deep relationships, and intentional spirituality. On the other hand, we’re so used to being busy all the time that many of us have not learned healthy ways of dealing with our minds when they are not constantly bombarded by information from external sources. Even worse, a good many of us have never disciplined ourselves to shut off those external sources when that information is unnecessarily stressing us out. Let’s address the second problem first: keeping the news running in the background 24/7 right now is not good for your health. You need current information to adapt appropriately, but televised or radio news has a built-in quest to keep you constantly tuned in. Thinking about all of it all the time, knowing you cannot fix it, is a waste of the body’s stress responses and can cause real harm by wearing down your immune system. You need to protect some real estate in your brain for things that are not COVID-19, not just because some of those things legitimately need attention—your friends and family, for instance—but because your mind needs enough rest from the constant blaring to make rational choices in response to the situation. The hoarding we’re seeing is not a rational response, but a simple function of the brain operating at its most stressed-out level, trying to regain a sense of control by shifting into fight-or-flight mode. Instead of bombarding yourself with all of this all the time, turn the TV and radio off and just check the news online every few hours. That’s enough to give you the big picture, and if something that affects your school or your job happens, your school or your job will tell you about it in due time. Plus, reading the news instead of watching it or listening to it cuts down on some of the emotionally charged nature of broadcast news. You’ve seen enough empty shelves in real life at this point; you don’t need to watch hours of footage about it. As for filling up the empty time, take a few moments to consider what you always wished you had time to do and have never been able to get around to. Exercise more? You may not be able to get to the gym, but you can go on runs outside when the weather’s nice, pace in your living room, or do push-ups anywhere. Read more? You now have time to do it. Take up a time-consuming hobby like crocheting or cooking from scratch? As long as you can find and afford the supplies, now’s your chance. In the ordinary course of life, we all put things off to attend to whatever is most urgent. Now that much of the urgent busyness of life is suspended, this is an incredible opportunity to think about and do all those things you’ve been putting off—and that will be our subject for tomorrow. It happened very suddenly: one day I was cheerfully chatting with some of the women of my church while cooking potluck, and the next day I couldn’t speak a single word without being in excruciating pain. Little did I know it then, but I would spend the next 5 weeks in what we now suddenly call social distancing.
At first, I would not even leave the house because I was afraid that whatever sickness had taken possession of my voice could be passed to others. There was a 10-day stretch in which I didn’t even step outside my house because I knew that if I bumped into anyone, I would be too instinctively friendly not to speak the words of common courtesy: “hi,” “excuse me,” and “thank you” and spend the rest of the day in excruciating pain. The rest of me was healthy, though, especially once I had caught up on sleep. It was a truly bizarre and unprecedented situation for me. The entire world now finds itself in a truly bizarre and unprecedented situation. The world has begun social distancing in dramatic ways over the last few days. As I have watched this unfold (and dealt with the logistical nightmare of helping move my church’s services into the virtual realm), I have come to the stunning realization that because of my rare and bizarre illness, I am one of the few people with hard-won experience to share with others grappling with their new reality. Of course, the situations aren’t exactly the same. Some things about my illness were easier:
On the other hand, while the present emergency is undoubtedly frustrating and stressful, it does have its points. Some things about it that are actually easier than my sickness was are:
The two experiences have their differences, but a lot of the same skills transfer, and that’s what this is all about. Even for a raging extrovert like myself, social distancing isn’t the end of the world. It is possible not just to survive these strange times, but even thrive a little. Things are crazy, but meanwhile, life goes on! |
AuthorJillian Lutes is the youth pastor at West Covina Hills Seventh-day Adventist Church. Archives
May 2020
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