We Can Do Hard Things, Thursday 3/19/20

Hey, Reader, how's it going today? I confess to feeling an uptick of rage. It started about an hour ago when I heard about someone I know testing positive for the virus. (How are we going to write this word? Virus? Corona Covid? Covid-19? Should we be clever or ironic or matter-of-fact and terse? Maybe the uptick started last night when I went to bed and read a few emails from our old pediatrician's office. He's a private doctor who treats a lot of very wealthy families and celebrities. I "picked" him over 23 years ago because he was willing to work with my babies' vaccination schedule given Sophie's seizure disorder and the suspicious way it started. That's another story and we sure as hell aren't going into that now. I'm telling you this so you know why I took all three of my children, through their childhood, to a ridiculously expensive pediatrician. Don't get me wrong. I love the man and his staff.  Fortunately, we made very few visits to the pediatrician, but I can honestly say that in nearly every single instance,  I spotted a familiar golden face.



You know what? Forget this story. It's about self-tests for The Virus, how they were available for $250. How as soon as the newsletter went out, first come, first serve, another newsletter arrived and all the tests were gone, accounted for, paid for, etc., as if those tests were toilet paper, frantically purchased and hoarded.

Capitalistic concierge medicine.

My uptick of rage is related to my son announcing that several Lakers have The Virus or have tested positive, and I've been reading accounts from FRIENDS that they haven't been able to get a test despite having symptoms of  The Virus. So, all I'm going to say about this is the same thing I've been harping (that's a fine word, isn't it?) about for all the years you've been reading this shit that I write and that is that we can not call ourselves a great country when the country has such a huge disparity between those that are obscenely rich and the rest of us. Where celebrities and pro athletes and rich people have access to healthcare while regular folks do not.

Let's not even get into the disabled issue.

Read this.

When all of this is over, I think I don't want to hear another word about a celebrity or a pro athlete or really anything related to vast sums of money or adulation of those who have vast sums of money.

Up
tick





d


o


w


n


ward.











I did have a good morning teaching my dear students. One made a video for his final project related to the great Flannery O'Connor's short story "A Good Man is Hard to Find." I practically fell on the floor in a state of shock and awe when I watched it. Honestly. This 14-year old kid got that short story and created something original, weird and incredible. I wish I could share it with you and will let you know if he makes it public on Vimeo.

I also spoke with my therapist in a telephone session, and that helped me a lot. We compared notes on coping, talked at length about how we can do hard things, how helping others helps ourselves, how caregiving is a form of meditation and damn if I'm not grateful for the people out there working so hard to ease the suffering of others.

Thank you doctors and nurses and all those who help in the healthcare world.

Here's a poem by Lynn Unger:

PANDEMIC

What if you thought of it
as the Jews consider the Sabbath—
the most sacred of times?
Cease from travel.
Cease from buying and selling.
Give up, just for now,
on trying to make the world
different than it is.
Sing. Pray. Touch only those
to whom you commit your life.
Center down.

And when your body has become still,
reach out with your heart.
Know that we are connected
in ways that are terrifying and beautiful.
(You could hardly deny it now.)
Know that our lives
are in one another’s hands.
(Surely, that has come clear.)
Do not reach out your hands.
Reach out your heart.
Reach out your words.
Reach out all the tendrils
of compassion that move, invisibly,
where we cannot touch.

Promise this world your love—
for better or for worse,
in sickness and in health,
so long as we all shall live.

Going Back to Sleep with Stevie Wonder

You're up at five because you might still be on east coast time. You meditate and feel a wash of gratitude for the day you spent with friends from the east coast, for Sophie's dry palms (you'd felt them earlier), for something new in your life, for the beautiful morning. You do some work for The Job That Might Be No More. You make an egg and toast for Henry and refrain from telling him that last night you looked through his school papers and read on his leadership application that you were his mentor and most admired person because you take care of my sister and never give up and  she is always there even immediately after she's mad at me. You also refrain from telling him that your eyes dripped tears on the copy machine. After he leaves, you begin the process of getting Sophie ready for school. You're out of coffee (significant for what follows). Sophie has actually been up for hours, making your east coast time wake-up slightly less painful because you'd be up with her anyway, but you refrain from giving her CBD because you believe that she has reached saturation and that might be the reason for her inexplicable turn for the worse over the weekend. You have been stifling distress about this, but this morning her palms are dry and warm as opposed to clammy and cold, so you feel relief and wonder whether you'd better start yet another strain of the CBD or keep to this one at a lower dose. The only trouble is that the new one costs about five times more than the old one, and now that you have The Job That Might Be No More, you're definitely not going to be able to afford the new one. You'll think about that later and all the implications of Cannabis Capitalism as you've had no coffee and you forgot to buy some more for the third day in a row. You make Sophie's lunch and pack it in her backpack, then toast some bread and spread peanut butter on it for her, slice some strawberries and prepare her meds. You bring her into the kitchen and feed her. She seems much better, but by the fourth bite or so, she goes into a slow-motion dance, her arms bent at a weird angle, her fingers fluttering and her head turns to the left instead of right which is strange. You call her name and try to get her attention but she is elsewhere. You dissociate. In a couple of minutes she begins chewing whatever was in her mouth, and you finish feeding her. You bring her into her bedroom to change her for school, and she lays back on her bed and falls asleep. You turn on her iPad and curl up beside her listening to Stevie Wonder. Don't you worry bout a thing. You fall asleep because you've had no coffee and in your dream you are young and someone you loved is in the dream, but it's ok to wake up. It feels delicious today to have gone back to sleep, to then wake up.

They say your style of life's a drag
And that you must go other places
Just don't you feel too bad
When you get fooled by smiling faces.

Free Money Day

via FreeMoneyDay.org

I like to say that behind all the stress that comes with seizures and Sophie's disabilities is love and there's so much love that it more than makes up for the hideous stuff. I also say that behind financial distress is absolutely nothing, just a big, black hole that sucks up fear and spits it back out. I've been fearful of late, in micro ways and macro ways, stepping very close to the edge of that black hole.


Then I read this about Free Money Day, organized by Post Growth Institute, a group that is exploring alternative paths to global prosperity across six continents. It sounds completely wacky and utterly idealistic, perhaps even ridiculous, but I like it. Here's what I like:

"The idea is simple: participants take any amount out of their pockets—whether it’s two coins or five dollars—and give it away to a complete stranger. The gift can happen at work, on a plane, in the streets, on a bus, or even online. Instead of paying it forward, the project is all about paying half forward—each person who receives a gift is asked to pass half of the funds to somebody else."

The co-founder of the institute, Dr. MaClurcan says that "one of the biggest myths that we believe is that there isn't enough money to go around. It's inequality in how resources are divided, not a lack of abundance, that makes resources seem more scarce than they are." There's also this:

"Our obsession with making more money as individuals is mirrored by our societal addiction to unending economic growth, despite the fact that neither of these, at the end of the day, makes any of us any happier," the founders write on their site. "The money systems in which we are currently enmeshed are fundamentally unstable—they create bubbles, and a destructive boom-bust cycle, which result in loss of jobs, homes, health, and even lives."

A solution is to give participants the opportunity to step back from the growth-minded Western culture, even for one day, and flip the fear associated with losing money into an opportunity to share it.

I've got to deliver a cake to a park in Burbank tomorrow morning, so I think I'm going to do it. I'm going to take ten dollars and give it someone and ask them to give away five of it. Call me silly, but I'm glad there are people out there thinking up these nutty things. It gives me hope.

Go here for more information about Free Money Day from the wonderful publication Good News or go directly to the site FreeMoneyDay. And for all the cynics out there, the hard-core conservatives and haters of "liberal crap" (someone said this to me recently), I'm thumbing my nose at you. So there.