I’ve been thinking a good deal about what perspectives this pandemic can offer? What am I actively learning from what’s happening?
I was speaking with a physician last week and he used the word, “grit” to describe a behavior to pay attention to during COVID. It hit me like a blindside block and I’m not too certain I heard most of the rest of what he said as I thought it was so profound.
COVID is testing our: health, children, jobs, relationships, patience, finances, and the list goes on and on…
COVID is testing our resolve. COVID is our generation’s GRIT test…if you can choose to see it that way.
If you choose to see it, you can see this very resolve showing itself all over in wide arranging scenarios.
For example, yesterday was Halloween. Today, the internet was ON FIRE with photos and videos of people committed to continuing the tradition of Halloween with unique and creative solutions to deliver “the prize” (Candy) to our kids who were seeking some normalcy in the midst of a pandemic.
- I saw people who fashioned tubes/chutes/gutters used to send candy toward their onlookers with a little help from gravity
- I saw a medieval style catapult constructed to launch candy to awaiting trick-or-treaters with bags held wide open
- I saw row of bags attached to a fence with clothes pins holding individual treats to be taken one-by-one by ghosts and ghouls
ALL of this, is GRIT.
Resolve to not let a pandemic get the best of us. Creatively focused to “embrace the suck” as the Navy Seals say, and find a way. Schools have done it. Businesses, hospitals, restaurants, professional sports are all finding creative ways evolve.
I find stoicism healthy here. The stoics would teach us to observe reality as it is, and not as we want it to be. But then move. Move forward.
Floods will rob us of one thing, fire of another. These are conditions of our existence which we cannot change. What we can do is adopt a noble spirit, such a spirit as befits a good person, so that we may bear up bravely under all that fortune sends us and bring our wills into tune with nature’s.
– Seneca, Letters from a Stoic
The pandemic has certainly thrown all of us off what was once considered our “normal” day-to-day modus operandi. It’s also showing us where our resolve is.
I’m a self confessed optimist. I DO believe there is a way through and it very likely won’t be easy. Not in the least. That said, the way forward lives with the people and their ingenuity. I certainly believe in that.
Instead of looking for ease of passage. Lean into grit.
