Since my last post, which also happened to be germ-related but only to a stomach bug and not a pandemic, it feels like the world has changed. A lot. Actually, it feels like the world is right this moment in an unsettling amount of shift, as if the changes are literally happening with each passing minute and none of us know exactly where we might land when this ends.

Look. I’m not here to lecture or preach or try to convince you of anything actually. I’m here to record my life and my experience because that is what I’ve always used this blog for, and now feels like a time that needs some processing, recording, and grounding, because, dang…stress levels are running at a fever pitch right now, even if no one you know is actively running a fever (and I pray they aren’t and won’t).

Today I was supposed to be in Denver for the book tour of one of my favorite authors ever. Yesterday she cancelled all but two events, including ours and I spent all of last night trying to figure out just how serious all the professionals are about this social distancing thing. After tossing and turning instead of sleeping all night, I decided by this morning that nope, I couldn’t in good faith go and expose myself to an unnecessary crowd, and then woke up to an email that the event was in fact cancelled anyway, which brought a sense of relief because I knew both I and the event coordinators had made the right choice. And right now so many of us are dealing with similar decisions, some on small-social-event scales and others like what-to-do-about-schools massive scales.

I realize that the best thing to do right now is not freak out but honestly, when are you already a person prone to over-thinking and anxiety, that’s a pretty tall order on top of actually trying to navigate how to prepare and plan for your family to move through whatever the heck is yet to come.

Right now I have no answers. I know we will do our best to limit exposure (but does that mean shutting down everything except for school as long as school stays open?). I know I’ll keep harping on the children to wash their dang hands all the live-long day (just like I always do). I know I’ll start looking at our pantry and seeing what I can do to meal prep and make sure that we are prepared for illness should it come. I know I’m going to revisit my yoga and mediation practice to see if I can tap into some sense of calm because there seems to be a whole mess of chaos, information, opinions, and noise flying through the air and the interwebs these days and pretty much everywhere (real and virtual) feels like potential scary place to be.

And even though I don’t plan on taking my family to church for a while (even though they’ve been working hard to stay on top of what they can do to limit exposure during services), I’m going to see if I can do a better job of clinging to the message posted on our sign board this week that I happened to see today while driving a kid to an appointment instead of heading to Denver, because as much as I want to believe in the good of people helping others (and I do), I think right now I also need a sense of some higher power also looking out for me (and you and everyone).