You, Me, Feeling Connected Is More Important

I was only ordering a coffee.

Of course I care people are dying. I wouldn't wish that on my family. I certainly don’t wish it on her family.  

Hers are stuck behind closed doors in Northern Italy. Friends, parents, grandparents. Able to leave the house only for food and medicine. Only one person at a time. 

The shit is very real. 

Yet I struggle. 

Is this all proportionate? 

Thousands of people have died and continue to. Nobody wants that. But this fear, of something unseen, uncontrollable, operates on another, hidden plane. Silent. Stealthily. Pointing to feelings of helplessness.

This fear is a virus at least as potent as it’s viral other. That is it how it looks to me. 

But what I think is unimportant. 

Her family in isolation, many miles away. Her fears are real. This is all that is important. 

“Do you speak to them very much?” I ask. 

“Yes, everyday! Sometimes twice a day”, she beams! Maybe that is all that is important. Whatever the underlying story, whether her version or mine. That’s unimportant. 

Life is about connections.

Connecting to tribes, to friends, to family, to colleagues, to neighbours, to coffeeshop colleagues, to baristas!

It is timeless. It is bigger than our fears. Bigger than the virus itself. 

Finding the opportunity to point to it, to remember, to remind, transcends the worry, the ‘being right’, the ‘my story or your story’ debate. 

What we put these things down, we happen across a simple question, something which points to something bigger.

Like “do you speak to them much?” and in that we open the opportunity to connect. 

And the joy is in the connection.