when will things get better

What a year! It was one year ago this week that I was on my last business trip. I was at an event with my publisher. Already, we knew COVID was out, and knew it was gaining steam. Other countries had already gone into lockdown… and the US was on the precipice.

While I was away, my wife and I were coordinating with our adult children, trying to make sure we could get them to our home before travel was locked down. That weekend, both came home.

We thought it might be a number of weeks. They were thinking two to three. I was thinking a month or a bit more.

That ended up being months on end. They spent more of 2020 in our home than in their own places.

The economy screeched to a halt, trips were canceled, schools were closed. And our medical system started to strain, faltering under the weight of one illness closing off some areas, while filling others.

It seemed like every day, there was some new shift, new discovery, new point of vulnerability. And in its wake, we, as a country and a world, strained to cope. The grief poured out in anger and despair. Some continued their grief in the world of denial.

And still, the numbers climbed. Families lost loved ones. Spouses lost partners. The world lost citizens. To the point that we could no longer truly comprehend the numbers. Some people recalculated by throwing caution to the wind. Others recalibrated to a life in isolation, hoping that was safe.

One year later. What a year!

Oh, and it isn’t over! Although there are plenty of places and people trying to move on, we are still in the midst of a crisis. While there is a place, in the not-so-distant future, where we get back to a life much more similar to a bit more than a year ago, we aren’t there yet.

And we are also now seeing that the pandemic will not end equally. It hasn’t impacted citizens equally, and the end will come just as unequally. But it will come. How do we get there? I hope together, and I hope a bit wiser.

In this week’s Thriveology Podcast, I think about the shifts and impacts of this past year.

RELATED RESOURCES:
Coping with COVID Series
Finding or Building Hope
Moving Through Grief

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There are days when you just wish that something would change. The same ol’ same ol’ just seems to roll along. And then there are the days you wished that things wouldn’t change. What happened? How did things turn upside down?

One simple word to explain both situations: Life.

If you don’t find that comforting, let’s call it the cycle of life. Because cycles keep on rolling. If you can’t wait for a change, no worries. Things will change. If things seem so be changing on all sides, guess what? Change will stop. Things will re-configure.

In life, we are always moving through a cycle: Order, Disorder, Reorder. The first can get a little old and stale. But at least it is predictable and… maybe even feels safe. Then comes the call, the letter, the diagnosis, the pink slip, or maybe just the next step. A child goes off to college, you finish college, a friend moves away, you move away. Something shifts and throws you into disorder.

It is a tough spot. Painful and grief-ful. But life does not stop there. We move through it, find a new way to keep on moving. And life re-orders. It is a new order. But it is the re-order.

And at some point, the reorder becomes the order. And the cycle repeats. From the day we are born until the day we die.

The question is how we move through the cycle… not IF, but HOW.

Listen to this episode of the Thriveology Podcast for moving through the Order/Disorder/Reorder Cycle.

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