A crisis reveals a lot about you and the people you love. When normal life and decorum are stripped away, you may be left exposed and raw, emotional and fragile, or you may demonstrate a strength of which you were previously unaware. You may be alternately strong and weak, or both simultaneously. When you are hurting, you know your friends by whether they stand by you or criticize you, or abandon you altogether. You find out how well you love others—whether you have a reserve out of which to give. Patterns from your childhood may reassert themselves, or you may find that the only solid ground to stand on rests on the healthy habits you have formed in adulthood.

I have made some observations about myself, some of which are not pretty. I have laughed heartily at all the introvert/extrovert videos circulating, at how true they are. I am married to someone who once told me “I would be perfectly happy on a deserted island.” This idea filled me with horror…I would be suicidal on a deserted island, or, like Tom Hanks’ character in Cast Away, I would be making friends with inanimate objects. I am surprised at how resentful I feel at Jay’s ability to remain calm, steady, happy, industrious…so normal despite the abnormal circumstances.

We have been isolated before—I mean, we live on a boat, right? But I’ve discovered that I can handle about three weeks in paradise, surrounded by the six people I love most in the world, before I need a new face to look at, a new person to talk to. An extrovert needs people like a plant needs sunshine. Some days, I’m fine, and the two-dimensional substitutes for a real live friend (facebook, phone, Zoom) are good enough. Other days, I feel trapped and cranky—I can’t even be nice to the people I am around. What’s wrong with me?

When I have very little control over the circumstances around me, I always go back to the mirror. Not to stare like Narcissus, but to examine my responses, which I can control, and to look at who I really am. It’s the oldest question in the book: Who am I? And the second, Why am I here? These questions invariably lead me back to the bedrock of my spiritual faith; either I am here by cosmic accident or I am here because Someone put me here. Both answers require faith—no one was there at the beginning to see how it all got started, and it requires an astronomical amount of time and a stretch of the imagination to get from an amoeba to a human mind.

For reasons with which I could fill a book, I have come to the conclusion that Someone put me here, that it wasn’t an alien civilization (because if it were, I would still have to ask who created the aliens?), that I’m not part of a computer simulation (because if I were, I would still have to ask, who is the programmer?), that we are more than mere physical manifestations of the life force, and that life has meaning, and that Good is as real as Evil, and that the source of that Good is personal and knowable. If you’ve read what I’ve written before, this comes as no surprise.

But I also see the darkness in my own reflection—my capacity for meanness, sadness, selfishness—a human nature at war with better impulses. I see the choices before me: to be patient or angry, to sow peace or discord, to respond to irritations with gentleness or harshness, to spend my time satisfying myself or caring for someone else, to offer thanks or complain, to forgive or hold a grudge, to focus on the negative or the positive. And the Someone who has me in the here-and-now has given me the power to exercise the better option, according to a favorite quote, “the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, faithfulness, goodness, and self-control” (Paul’s letter to the Galatians, chapter 5, verses 22-23, New International Version of the Bible).

Just like grapevines need rocky soil and harsh conditions to produce good fruit (in better conditions they produce only foliage), I myself grow spiritually during hardship. Circumstances may grow worse, or they may get better. But whatever the environment, I want to be the tree producing good fruit. Nothing could be simpler…or more difficult.

Because love is a choice I make, not a fleeting emotion, the small decisions I make every day become essential. To choose loving actions, I must make a connection with the Source of Love. I must learn to love myself—to accept that I am loved—in order to love others. Then, maybe then, I can “love my neighbor as I love myself.” Right now that means loving well the people in my direct environs, and the people with whom I have contact because the gift of technology brings humans together in an unprecedented way.

Paul warns the Galatians, just as he would warn us now, in an age when a person can hide behind a digital persona and say ugly things to his fellows with impunity, “if you keep on biting and devouring each other, watch out or you will be destroyed by each other. So I say, live by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the sinful nature…the one who sows to please his sinful nature, from that nature will reap destruction; the one who sows to please the Spirit, from the Spirit will reap eternal life. Let us not become weary in doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up” (Galatians chapter 5, verse 15 and chapter 6, verses 8-9).

I had a rough week, and maybe you did, too. I’m struggling to discipline myself and keep us in a routine that fosters productivity and positivity. Even if I limit the news coming in, I know things are bad—I am hearing from friends around the world about horrific circumstances that put my petty complaints into perspective. And so I write these pep talks as much for myself as for someone else who might benefit. I must wake up every morning and tell myself the truth: “God loves you. He has a plan. Don’t live in fear, but in love. Choose kindness. Be thankful. Don’t give up. Be the tree that bears good fruit.”

Despite the fact that I live on a boat and homeschool my kids, I’m not the kind of person who lies around in my PJs all day. For my own mental health, I have gotten up every morning for the last 18 1/2 years (as long as I’ve been a stay-at-home mom) and started my day dressed for success. For me that means a sundress or skirt/skort and top, or maybe blue jeans if it’s cold, and a matching necklace. If I’m having a really rough morning, I might put even put on a little makeup to spruce myself up, but those extreme measures are rarely necessary.

This quarantine has probably pushed all of us to the edge of our emotional comfort zones, and maybe over the edge in some cases. For people who have never been at home full-time with their kids, it has probably been extremely challenging. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there are single people suffering from isolation and wishing they had family around to keep them company! Though I am more accustomed than most to being in a small space with my family, having nowhere to go to get off the boat even has me struggling a bit. I woke up Saturday feeling so blue I didn’t bother to get dressed. I wasn’t able to pep-talk myself out of my funk by the first cup of coffee, so I took the second cup down to my cabin and wallowed. When my youngest kid came down to see what I was up to, I responded this way:

“You know when you’re having a bad day, when you have a bad attitude and everything that comes out of your mouth gets you into trouble, and I have to send you to your room to get control of yourself? Well…I sent myself to my room. And I’ll come up when I have control of myself.” She accepted this explanation and did a great job of entertaining herself the rest of the day.

Later, Jay came down, worried, and tried to snap me out of it by offering the old “we have a lot to be thankful for” speech. I acknowledged that he was right, assured him that I was feeling grateful…but that I still felt sad. That I could both realize what I have (food, family, health, home, love) and grieve at the same time (suffering of others, loss of normalcy, missing time with friends, loss of freedom, ruined plans). To make matters worse, the weather had turned hot and buggy for a few days and the mosquitoes and sweat had lowered my sleep quality. Nothing like physical discomfort to enhance the experience of wallowing. And hormones, don’t forget hormones.

So I spent the whole day just being sad. In the afternoon, I reached out to a friend, whose elderly mother lives with her. I had just read some news about how nursing homes are death-traps right now, and I got outside myself long enough to send a message saying I was so glad her mom was at home with her, even though I know that care-taking has been hard sometimes. She responded, and asked how I was doing. I answered honestly, and she called. Bless her—she’s no stranger to anxiety and depression—and she seems to have a knack for speaking kind words and making me laugh. We had a long talk, and by the end of our conversation, I no longer felt like crying. When we hung up, she sent me some photos of her daffodils, which are blooming, and it made me smile.

I got up, took a shower, got a haircut (thanks to my teenage daughter’s newly-acquired hairdressing skills), watched the sunset with Jay on the foredeck, and made a nice dinner. I woke up Sunday feeling much better. And now I’m asking myself: is a day spent wallowing a waste of time? Is there something else I should have done? Does camping out in the valley sadness have a purpose? My conclusions so far:

• Wallowing didn’t make me feel better. That’s the point. I was choosing to stay in my sadness, literally rolling in it. But there’s a fine line between sadness and self-pity.
• It’s okay to experience the whole range of human emotions, as long as we don’t let them run the show. It’s okay to go to the edge of the lake, dip our toes in, get wet…but if we wade in over our heads, we might drown. I have a healthy fear of the deep end.
• Crying out in sadness is a universally human thing to do. I love Bible stories with wallowing characters: Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, Elijah running into the desert to die, David pouring out his soul to God in sorrow, Hannah on her face in the temple begging for a child, Paul asking, “who will rescue me from this body of death?” Woe is me. They are not talking to themselves, though, but to God, with hope that help is on the way. We can let our grief become a prayer.
• Sadness/grief that doesn’t move toward acceptance or healing can become simultaneously selfish and self-destructive—choosing to dwell in disappointment prevents us from caring for ourselves and others.
• There are things I could have done despite my sadness: go for a walk, listen to music, take a shower, write in my journal, complete a task, read a book, play with my kids, practice ukulele, help someone else: any of these things could have done the trick. Sometimes, when we don’t feel like doing something, that’s exactly when we need it the most.
• I have never battled depression. I cannot even imagine what it must be like to live with a life-sapping melancholy. I am talking about one day of sadness, something a pep talk can address. If you are depressed, if your feelings of hopelessness or despair are keeping you from being able to live your life, get help. Reach out and talk to someone who understands. You are not alone.

I am really bad at keeping plants alive. Even the hearty aloe is not safe on our boat. The one I have kept since the last one got doused with salt water and I sent it, literally, to greener pastures to be revived, isn’t looking so good. With a tiny bit of hope (a last-ditch effort), I watered it this morning on deck, where it sat waiting to go ashore, to the top of the marina dumpster where there is a “free pile.” If the thing is all dead (not just mostly dead), at least someone could re-use the pot. This dead plant got me thinking.

With lots of bad news circulating, the death tally growing, I have been observing people’s responses and seeing very different reactions to the threat of COVID-19. There are people taking it seriously, people scoffing, people suffering anxiety, people arguing for a utilitarian response (where the ends justify the means), and people echoing the words of Revolutionary Patriots—”give me liberty or give me death!” With everyone eyeing each other suspiciously over a mask, fear is in the air.

There is a lot to fear right now: the pandemic itself—of getting sick, the possibility of interminable isolation, the loss of livelihood, the possible loss of liberty, the uncertain future—and, of course, the biggest fear: Death. We face (or run from) this fear every day as a life form on planet earth. If we have been ignoring our own mortality and the questions that surround it, the bad news all around us has probably brought them to the surface. And what we believe about life and death shapes both our responses to the pandemic and our reactions to how others are dealing with it, including elected officials.

We must face our fears, our worst fears, and we must find courage to get up every morning and do what needs to be done while we wait for whatever comes next—keep our spirits up , care for the people we love, and do our daily tasks as best we can. I want to say that I am not afraid, that my sense of God’s love and presence leaves no room for fear, but maybe it’s because death to me is still a concept, a number on a graph, or a news story. I don’t work at a hospital; I am not surrounded by the sight, sounds, and smells of death. But the first-hand accounts are harrowing, and anyone who says otherwise has their head—or heart—buried in the sand.

But I also want to say something about fear’s opposite. And it’s not fearlessness, but faith. My faith is not an ignorant, callous, blind thing that says, “let the chips fall where they may.” It is a fragile thing—fed by hope and a history of God’s goodness to me personally—and it leads to compassion: I see fear and suffering in my fellow creatures and want so much to alleviate it. I believe that how I treat people matters more than dogma and theology. I believe in a God that allows evil (without good and evil, there can be no free-will choice and thus, no possibility of love), but that there is a plan in place to remedy it. I believe that God did send his spirit here in the form of a human being, who had the power to show us what love is, and that he was given the power over death itself, so that we can have communion with our Creator, both now and in a time to come. When death comes, I don’t have to face it alone (in a spiritual sense), and since it isn’t the end, I don’t have to fear it.  

Because I am freed-up from the tyranny of fear (not that I never feel it, only that I won’t allow it to camp out in my soul), I can use my mental and emotional energy to love better. I can reach out to friends who are struggling. I can be creating instead of consuming. I can pray for healthcare workers, elderly in nursing homes, the sick and dying, my enemies, my hurting neighbors. I can give when called upon to meet needs. I can feel joy in the middle of hardship. I can focus on something other than cripplingly-dark thoughts. And I hope that you can, too.

Lastly, and because my poor little aloe got me thinking, I believe that loss and pain can serve a purpose, that my life (and yours) in all its glory and its mess, its triumphs and mistakes, has meaning, and that God can recycle all the bad and make something good of it. Maybe that little greenish spike will come back to life and my plant will get a second chance. But maybe it will die and “return to the dust from which it came,” becoming fertilizer for new life in the future. Without death—death of the selfish nature, death of a Messiah, death of organic matter—there can be no new life. It’s a hard teaching, but one that can also bring comfort.

Let me start off by saying that doing school at home is not the same thing as homeschooling.

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, I want you to know how much I respect and support the families which have been plunged headlong into the new “adventure” (a.k.a. what happens when something goes wrong) of educating their children. Even if your child is sitting in front of a computer screen going to a virtual classroom, you are still at home with him, her, or them, ensuring that they get what they need to succeed in life. Whether you homeschool, help your children with homework, pay for tutoring, or provide a computer so they can receive instruction, the bottom line is that we all care about the same thing.

Many people have said to me, about our homeschooling five kids on a boat, “Better you than me. If I were at home all day with my kids, I would kill them!” When they closed the schools in March, this was my first thought. So…how’s it going? Maybe you are discovering what we did 15 years ago when our own homeschool journey started: homeschooling is not so much about education as it is about navigating human relationships, loving each other when you don’t feel like it, and conflict resolution.

When your kid goes to school, you have the luxury of forgetfulness: your kid wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, you drop him/her off at school, the teacher deals with the grumpy student, and 10 hours later the bad morning is a distant memory. Not so at home. First you have to deal with the bad attitude (theirs and yours) and then you can think about instruction and learning. By the time you’ve solved all the personal problems, it’s time for lunch! (I speak only partly in jest…)

Of course, with the help of technology, not all parents are required to add curriculum planning to the perfect storm of working from home, managing a household, cooking, cleaning, and maybe recovering from an illness. So, on the one hand, you have support from your child’s school, but on the other, you have very little freedom about how/when schoolwork gets done. By now, you have probably googled “homeschool ideas” enough to know that this is a diverse subject; each homeschool is as unique as the family who chose to do it. In our local homeschool community, we have everything from unschoolers to those who buy curriculum-in-a-box.

Our family is somewhere in the middle, focusing on real-world learning experiences—hands-on and on-location learning as much as possible. Right now, our oldest three kids are in high school, and they are doing dual enrollment at the local community college, hoping to graduate at 18 or 19 with an Associates Degree which they will have gotten for FREE. The younger two are using a combination of good-old-fashioned book-learning, internet resources, and home-grown projects and games. For now, all our classroom, field trip/travel, and community-based options have disappeared, so we’re feeling the pinch, too.

But here’s the part you need to hear right now, in the middle of our quarantine mass-home-school experiment: No one cares more about your children than you do. No one—no  teacher, no policy-maker, no school counselor. This qualifies you to make decisions about their education. Is the school-at-home model giving your children continuity or creating stress and misery? Is their creativity being crushed or inspired? Are they being taught to think for themselves or to become part of a system? Maybe it’s working for you, or maybe it’s just about keeping your kids busy until school starts up again. But if it’s not, if this whole quarantine thing has you re-thinking what’s important in your life, if you are re-prioritizing, if you have the time and energy, then it’s at least worth considering homeschooling (for the short term at least).

And by homeschooling, I mean kitchen chemistry, reading aloud, geography puzzles, unit studies, chess, baking, book-making, painting, ukulele lessons, ant farms, car repair, gardening, astronomy…the universe is the limit! The internet that just made school-at-home possible has also made homeschooling accessible to all. I don’t know how many hours each day your child is required to “do school,” but even if you continue their current program, you can supplement what they’re learning online with some fun projects at home. Don’t waste this precious time with your kids: do something awesome they’ll remember for the rest of their lives!

I’ve written about homeschooling a lot on our blog, and if you’re interested, here are some links to previous posts:

Have you ever tried doing yoga on a moving platform? Living on a boat requires constant, minute movements to stay balanced. I don’t even know I’m doing it, but my body is always making small adjustments to say upright. Ironically, balance poses are the biggest challenge in my yoga practice, whether on the dive platform at sunset or on solid ground. If there’s the smallest ripple in the water or shift of the wind, I have to grab onto something or risk a fall. Indoors, unless I can find a good vertical line to focus on, I tip over almost as often. It’s very humbling.

I wish I could say that my emotional balance is better than my physical, but the truth is that I tend toward mood swings, a trapeze flight of high highs and low lows. I never stay at one extreme for very long, and I’m usually at the cheerful end of the pendulum swing, but after 45 years, I still don’t have complete mastery of my emotions. Being married to a steady, quiet, unexcitable person has helped a lot. The spiritual practices of prayer and meditation have helped a lot. Reading good books has helped, as has the free counseling of good friends. Being a parent—trying to model maturity for my children—has helped. But every day, on my yoga mat or off, I have to work to keep my balance.

When times are uncertain, when everything’s up in the air, when daily changes unsettle us, how do we ground ourselves? We must seek balance or fall over. Here are four areas on which we can be working over the next few weeks and months as we prepare for whatever comes next:

1.  Physical balance. We need to get some exercise or we’ll all gain the “quarantine fifteen.” Breathing, moving—these things center you in the present. They remind you that you are still alive, that as long as you have breath, you have hope. If you can, go for a walk, take a bike ride, go kayaking. If you can’t go outside, do yoga, push-ups, T-Tapp, weights, or some other indoor workout.
2. Emotional balance. Who do you love? Who loves you? Reach out to that person. Get a pep talk when you feel bad, give a pep talk when you feel good. If no one has any pep left, share the load and suffer together—that is the literal translation of “compassion” (from the latin prefix “com,”  with, and the root “pati,” to suffer). Do something loving for the people in your immediate surroundings, even when they don’t deserve it. That’s the whole point of love. It’s a gift, not something you earn. Sometimes it’s an act of the will, and not of the heart. We can choose a loving action even without warm fuzzy feelings. Steer clear of negativity, criticism, and pessimism.
3. Spiritual balance: Who are you? What is the significance of your life? What do you believe? What can you add to the world? If life is a meaningless accident, why do you still act as if it has meaning? Do you have a soul? What happens to you if you die? These are the hard questions, questions no one can answer for you. Now is a good time to ask them and to look for answers. Without some kind of underlying philosophy, without spiritual fortitude, a crisis can be overwhelming.
4. A Balanced Schedule: Somehow, without the constructs of school, work, sports, social activities, religious services, and appointments, we must find the self-discipline to make something of this time. If we treat this as an extended vacation (or an endless happy hour), we will miss the good life lessons. Even if you are working your butt off to stay afloat, you must find some balance between work and rest or you will compromise your own health.
5. A Balanced Diet: It would be so easy to eat constantly right now. But we have to resist the urge to fill our emptiness with junk food and find things that are really satisfying to the body and soul. On our boat, we’re trying to keep up our healthy eating habits despite the temptation to bake…

However you find your balance—even if you fall over—get up on those wobbly legs, lift your hearts, breathe deeply, and don’t give up!