It’s Not a Panic!

How to keep your butt clean. Despite the pandemic.

How to keep your butt clean. Despite the pandemic.

Years ago, whenever my son would hear me draw my breath in quickly or make a sound approximating alarm, he’d look at me with the insouciant curiosity of a three year-old and ask, “What’s the panic?”

Precisely, my son. What IS the panic?

Can anyone tell me? Is this the zombie apocalypse? Is this the death knell of humanity? Will the world run out of toilet paper and have no way to keep our collective butt clean?

As my boy was ever-quick to remind me, “Dad, it’s not a panic.”

Panic is Not the Destination

I’m here to pass along that sentiment. Panic is anxiety.

As Seth Godin astutely observed, “Anxiety is nothing but repeatedly re-experiencing failure in advance.” In this case, what is failure? The “worst case scenario?”

The sky is NOT falling. The end is NOT near. So why panic?

Remain calm. Prepare for what may be a turbulent ride, but one where we are certain to arrive at new destination. And that destination is CHANGE. Which isn’t a destination at all, but a PROCESS. Like life: a process of being born and dying, evolution and growth, retreat and re-direction. Disease and cure, sickness and health, setback and recovery.

Change is adjustment, course correction — and what the world has been desperately in need of. It’s what most of us have been talking about and infinitely aware must occur—things NEED to change, they HAVE TO change, they ARE changing.

This is the End

If this is the end of the world as we know it, that’s a GOOD thing. The world as we know it ain’t working, it ain’t sustainable and ain’t making us joyful. So something’s gotta give — and this virus happens to be it (for now): an incredibly, efficient, effective, potent way to get us all to hit the PAUSE BUTTON.

This is a MICROSCOPIC ORGANISM we’re talking about. One that is bringing the entire planet to a halt: no travel, no movement, no work, no interaction, isolation, mass grocery shopping. This teeny-tiny micronic life form has forced the ENTIRE GLOBE to alter its behavior in fundamental ways.

What else has been able to do that?

Not protests nor preachers, nor governments nor dictators, nor fires nor floods, not volcanoes nor earthquakes, nor hurricanes nor tsunamis. Not oil spills nor platform explosions, nor political unrest, nor war, nor pollution, nor economics, nor garbage gyres, nor microplastics, nor mercury levels nor overfishing, nor incentives nor penalties, nor taxes nor laws, nor votes nor vetoes…

But this! Smaller than the period at the end of this sentence—exponentially smaller—has gotten the attention of us ALL.

If we can’t see this virus as a force for good, for connection, for revision, for transformation then I don’t know what will do the job. But if this doesn’t do it, you can be CERTAIN that nature will throw us something even more profoundly to life-altering to get humanity to change its ways.

Pandemic’s Purpose

Don’t just do something, SIT THERE! Stay at home. Cradle your kids. Kiss your loved ones. Reflect on life. Take stock of your blessings (and your dried goods). Ruminate, reflect and revise your assessment of life.

Choose to PAUSE instead of PANIC.

Contemplate where our planet — and our species — is he❤️rted (not headed). What’s it really all about? What are you about? Why are you here, why am I here, why are we here? What’s the purpose of this virus if not to awaken us to our OWN purpose. Humanity’s purpose? Our planet’s purpose?

This “pandemic” forces us to confront how our governments communicate with its citizens and with one another, how our health care systems are prepared to handle our collective health, how the media serves us or enslaves us to its whims, how we can choose to be whipped into a fearful frenzy or confront challenge with strength and grace and compassion.

And, most of all, how interconnected each and every human being is with every other human being on the Earth.

Viral Learning

To a virus, we’re all the same.

The virus is color-blind, race-blind, nation-blind. It’s not ethnocentric, nationalistic, nor xenophobic. Maybe we can take a cue from the microbe and learn to regard each other in the same way: at a cellular-molecular level, we’re all fundamentally identical. So if we’re the same on the inside—where it counts!—why must we cause so much pain to each other because our outsides manifest differently?

Separation is our greatest prevarication.

~ Truth Serum

A virus doesn’t discriminate. Doesn’t hesitate. Doesn’t prevaricate. We’re the host. And it wants to spread despite the cost. Kinda sounds like us. Humanity. And its relationship to our Earth right now. We don’t really discriminate between oak or redwood or Douglas fir in terms of our exploitation of the forests. We don’t hesitate before mining Earth’s “resources” from underground, above-ground, undersea or mountain top.

But we do prevaricate. We lie incessantly about the truth of what we’re doing to our world — which is actually what we are doing to ourselves.

Viral Blessings

So, ultimately, what’s the panic?

With an attitude adjustment about the way we approach the future of our work, our health, our lives, our planet, we can heal this pandemic.

Get along with aplomb. Be adept and adapt.

~ Truth Serum

So take a deep breath, hold it in for as long as you can and allow the soothing words of a sagacious three year-old to wash over you…

IT’S NOT A PANIC.

Strength and grace are enough to keep our noses — and our butts — clean. Even without the toilet paper.

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For more calming missives — and a path to a greater you — order my “life-changing” “gem” of a book, How To Succeed on Purpose.

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