Yesterday, our seventeen-month-old walked into the kitchen with a slinky stuck on her foot. She was picking up her foot and putting it back down, again and again, trying to loosen her foot from the entanglement but she couldn’t quite get loose.
I had to laugh (and maybe take a short video before freeing her) because there have been so many times during this time of quarantine that I have felt the exact same way. I feel stuck in uncertainty and fear. I feel like I can’t get a good stride going because it’s so hard to plan ahead when there is new information every single day. I feel like there is something around my ankle that is holding me in place.
And maybe this is exactly where we need to be in order to remember how much we need help. We need to help each other stay safe. We need to help each other because so many people have lost their jobs. We need to help each other by checking on each other because the mental stress and anxiety of completely changing our lives so quickly while also constantly mitigating risks and managing a myriad of responsibilities are exhausting.
We need help to ask the Divine how we can continue to offer hope and life to each other during these strange times. We need to ask the Divine to help us not get stuck in fear and uncertainty. We need to look at what is holding us in place and ask for help finding a way out of that stuckness so that we can create and imagine a new way of being community together.