Today marks three weeks in quarantine, I think, maybe four? Either way it feels like a lifetime has passed since life was “normal”. Every morning I wake up in a completely different mood. Some days I feel motivated to accomplish something and be productive, some days I wake up and a flood of dread washes over me, sometimes I simply don’t wake up until a good chunk of the day has already passed. Being confined to my house has drastically increased the turnover rate of my moods. The intensity of them has also found its way up. The other day I was just sitting on my couch eating an apple and someone sneezed and my instant feeling was pure annoyance. I felt this overwhelming need to punch a wall to relieve this feeling of anger and resentment. All because of a sneeze. Twenty minutes later I was completely fine.
It’s interesting to me how that works. How our minds and our emotional stability change as our routines and our lives are uprooted. We might not think that our lives have much consistency or structure to them, in fact, I was convinced I was living in pure chaos prior to this. I couldn't take a breath, I was working through the burnout and trying to grasp at productivity. Now that I have what feels like endless time to relax and let myself calm down, I realize that the chaos was only chaos because I thought that was the only option. I think that when we are so caught up in life and are so focused on just finishing a to-do list, we forget that we can take a break and refocus ourselves. Find peace within the craziness. We believe that we have no control unless we are constantly working and moving and doing something. In reality, we have plenty of control, we have power in our lives that we forget about. We can’t control what happens, but we have total control over how we handle what happens. We can take a breath, we can take that break, we can say no.
It finally dawned on me that my life wasn't actually chaos. I just wasn’t giving myself the opportunity to see the whole picture. Now it may feel chaotic but life is always simpler than we think. The complexity only frightens us when we let it and the unfortunate reality is that we always will. But the important thing is that we take glimpses and moments to remember the simplicity of it all. Then we can remain sane.