Your Life One Day at a Time

Well, we’re all in it now, aren’t we?

As we self-isolate and our jobs and schools are home-based now, we are all going through the same global situation, yet still have completely different experiences.

I know families that are all under the same roof for the longest time in their collective memories.

I know people using their time to hustle at their jobs and/or crumble into a ball of anxiety.

For some, the pandemic pushed their working conditions into hyperdrive. For others, business slowed to a halt.

I know of those, for whom, very little has changed. Others are looking at a day that’s unrecognizable.

For activists and the community-minded, their missions remain the same, if not ramped up. When I read online, advocates for various causes see the opportunity to magnify their respective platforms. So much of it is competing and conflicting. Figuring out who’s right and who’s wrong is futile in all the shouting.

Still, in all this, what is our common bond? Where’s the thin piece of thread to which we’re all holding on? It is this:

This will pass one day at a time.

Now, what it will pass into is anyone’s guess. I can’t see how the U.S. will escape another recession. Specific industries will be hit hard, if they haven’t already. For example, the academic job market, where I was trying to break in for years, was already in a free-fall, and this will likely be its crash and burn. And this isn’t even considering the biggest calamity of it all, which is the loss of lives.

How we get through these days is just as important as bracing for what will happen in the days ahead. If you’re trying to quiet your frazzled mind, start with taking your life as simply as it’s coming—in batches of 24 hours. It’s overwhelming to consider anything else.

What I’m saying is, as cliche as it sounds, all we have is today. We have this moment, right now, and not a second ago or ahead. And that’s all that life is made of—individual moments that collect into a little life.

So, what will you do? Yeah, I know you don’t have control over a lot of things, yet where does your self agency kick in? None of this is going how we planned, but we may wield more power in our today than we think.

~Jennifer.