Yesterday, a couple of my sisters and I had an extended “conversation” via voice memos on Messenger about the shitshow ahead of us in Wisconsin, now that we are the only state in the nation with zero statewide public health restrictions for managing the spread of coronavirus. Instead, we have a patchwork of county and municipal-level orders, which are tricky to navigate and make it possible that one side of a block could be restricted, while the people across the street from you are not.

The immediate lifting of the statewide orders due to a WI Supreme Court ruling fast-tracked us to a new phase of this experience, the phase where we individually decide how to engage in a world that looks very different than it did three months ago. This will likely happen across the country as this round of stay at home orders expire and evolve.

It’s tricky, because while we know a little bit more than we did when this started, the bottom line is that the critical items are not yet in place: widespread testing is not available everywhere, there is no vaccine yet, and no treatments have emerged as broadly effective. Some things that we’re learning include: The death rate is substantially higher than that of influenza. People recovering from serious cases of Covid-19 are taking much longer to make full recovery than most people do with the flu. Children are increasingly dying of an illness related to Covid. Wearing face masks, correctly and in the right situations, helps prevent transmission. Non-white people are dying in disproportionate numbers. We are on the cusp of exceeding the Great Depression’s unemployment rate.

Social distancing and shelter-at-home orders have slowed transmission of the disease thus far. In view of all of the above, that seems really important, but people are understandably coming unglued. Where does all of this leave us? Living on mountains of uncertainty.

Gravity is in tact, but the ground is uneven. As we go forward from here, every one of us is going to have different perceptions of what is safe, what isn’t, and what we need to maintain sanity. Like hiking on a path of rubble, where I choose to place my foot for balance and safety may not be the same spot you would choose. This is going to be messy. Differences of opinion, approach, and belief are going to make our relationships a bigger part of our collective and individual anxieties.

It’s hard to cut our own path. It just is. We’re social beings and it’s hard to look at a neighbor who really wants to hang out and say “I’m sorry, I’m not comfortable with that.” They might think we’re judging them (and we might be) or implying that we don’t trust them. Family members might disagree. Teenagers might chalk this up as one more reason to hate their parents. We might seethe at scenes of crowded bars with righteous anger and envy at the same time.

I’ve been thinking a lot about how I might prepare for this. Harboring a lot of negative feelings about people I love or just have to co-exist with doesn’t sound like something I’d like to add to my mental plate right now. The only solution I can come up with is that I have to be prepared to offer grace wherever I can, to remember that we are all struggling, no matter what it might look like on the surface. I certainly can’t control other people’s decisions, so I have to manage my reactions.

I meditate most days, and sometimes I use mantras. This is the one I turn to when I’m feeling out of sync with the world around me or angsty about specific relationships:

We are walking shared earth and breathing shared air.
We are worthy and enough.
We are learning and growing.
We are love.

This is my own little adaptation of the traditional loving kindness meditation and each of those phrases has a specific meaning to me.

We are walking shared earth and breathing shared air. I like to start with a simple reminder that I am one of billions on this planet, which means both that my experience is just one piece of a much bigger world AND that the choices I make may impact others. We share this earth and its resources, we’re in this together.

We are worthy and enough. Every single one of us is worthy of love and basic human rights exactly as we are. We don’t need to do or be anything more than who we are for that to be true. It is a fact of our humanity.

We are learning and growing. Even while we’re worthy and enough just as we are, not one of us is perfect and not one of us stays the same forever. We falter, we make poor choices, we hurt each other. We change. We learn. And we grow (hopefully)…at the very least, we are in the process of growing.

We are love. This is the big one. My belief in God is what you might call “fluid”. On most days, I believe there is a source of goodness that exists beyond any of us individually, and within each of us individually. If there is a God, I believe we are all part of it and we are all made up of something essentially good – of love. I know that’s a bit treacly. It’s the hardest one for me to write about. But it’s also the one that sends a spark of energy right to my gut, every time I say it in meditation. So I keep saying it, regardless of what I can make myself believe on any particular day.

As we move forward through the social thickets of our communities this summer, I think I’ll be using this one a lot.