April 6, 2020
There is a beautiful silver lining in the difficult world of COVID-19!
Time spent.
It has been an interesting few weeks with family, nature and self while primarily in quarantine when not at work. It has been a very long time since I lived two lives simultaneously. The stress of dealing with a medical career in a pandemic while caring for children and our staff's health and economic sanity mirrored against time spent in the yard gardening with my wife, playing cards and chess with the kids or generally lounging around as a family TOGETHER
like never before. Family meals are prepared and served with grace and gratitude before consumption. Life is generally peaceful despite the hectic reality of a quarantined existence.
Extremes like this bring out the best and the worst in people based on their baseline sense of self and the limbic system's need to survive and be selfish. The vast majority of Americans in my sphere of work and home are amazing humans. Grateful, loving and generous of self. This is the America that we all know and love. We are a special mix of races, religions, creeds and choices. As Elon Musk once said,( I paraphrase here) most first responders, judges, healthcare workers and people are amazing. There are the rare dysfunctional humans that exist but they are so overshadowed by the beautiful souls now that it is so heart warming to be alive.
I recently watched a video by John Krasinski, from the Office and Jack Ryan, called Some Good News - Link. This video epitomizes what I am trying to say. We all want some good news. We want simple truths as opposed to the media that is doom and gloom and political infighting all day long slanted to fit a narrative that they want you to see depending on which side of the fence that they are on. We should be serving up happiness and truth not negativity and speculation.
Thank you all for being amazing and generous of self during this challenging time. Thank you all for following the CDC guidelines to protect the elderly and infirmed. Thank you all for choosing to be grounded when it is so easy to be frustrated and negative. Thank you all for making it amazing to be an American.
Knowing that 99% of us will see the other side of this mess is to know that 99% of us will have to work to rebuild the greatness of our country and our economy. Remember to spend this extra time to take care of self by eating well, meditating/praying, sleeping well and being the same positive self that you are. Then when life gets back to normal, we can be fully charged to roll up our sleeves and rebuild what was damaged.
Grateful,
Dr. M
