Step
One
“The
first step to calculating which way to go is to find out where you are.”
Margaret
Thatcher
Do you
get lost a lot? Or do you have a natural sense of direction that allows you to
simply know which way to go? My sister Jerrie did. In the days before GPS, she
could drive into an unfamiliar town and, by some mystical “spidey sense,”
orient to location. My sister was a mathematician—a statistician to be exact—so,
perhaps the ability to orient is found on the same gene as the one that allows
you to understand algebra. Wherever it is, I do not have it. What I do instead is
wander around until I see something familiar and then adjust accordingly. In
other words, I’m lost a lot.
Margaret
Thatcher’s words resonate with me on many levels. We intuitive types are not
good at making strategic plans, but we know how to feel things through. When, for
instance, I make a shopping list, I invariably leave it at home. But, having
made the list, I mostly remember what I wrote down. Whoa be it if I go to the
grocery store without having made a list—I may buy forty items, and none will
be what I came to get in the first place. As Lewis Carrol and George Harrison
said, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”
So, we
are in this new world right now, all of us, when we don’t know where we are
going, or where we’ll be six months or a year from now. We don’t have a
strategic plan for getting through something we’ve never been through before,
so we’re all just feeling our way. It’s destabilizing for almost everyone. In
times like these, we must listen to the people who know how to navigate at
least one aspect of the situation before we move to the next one. With Covid-cases
up 80% in the US, Dr. Fauci has told us many times what we must do to slow the
spread of the virus. We cannot fix the economy until we do that, and we cannot get
on with life, no matter how much we deny it, until we do. That is step one.
We’ll
get to step two when we have stable footing on step one. Masks, distance, avoid
crowds, wash hands, sanitize, stay home as much as possible—these are simple guidelines.
Any child could do them. Since we are not in control of this virus, we must at
least be in control of ourselves. In the famous words of Dr. King, “You don’t
have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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