Places everybody! Our legwarmers are on, and our warm-ups completed to start final repetitions for the Mid-Pan / Sem-Two Extravaganza. And boy, am I feeling all the things! The genuine pleasure in reconnecting with colleagues is juxtaposed by the distinctly Octoberish appearance of our good selves as we wave our newly sanitised hands across the 1.5 divides in the hallway. I know it has been done to death, but I have decided to dust off the trusty roller-coaster metaphor for this correspondence. Here’s the twist: we are on a very specific roller-coaster, the Fujiyama.
On the 8th of July, River Davis writes in the Wall Street Journal that the chief executive and the corporate boss of the Fuji-Q Highland amusement park in Tokyo took a ride on the park’s No. 1 attraction, the Fujiyama roller coaster (shown here). Screaming has been banned on all roller-coasters in the park to prevent COVID-19 transmission. To which I ask, hands thrown in the air: “ What is the point of a roller-coaster if not to release blood curdling shrieks of horror as you real plunge to your fake death, saliva pooling externally at the side of your contorted mouth”? The masked executives are captured on video as part of the park’s reopening campaign enduring the ride’s 230-feet plunge in complete silence. Here’s the best part: park management has placed a helpful notice next to the Fujiyama encouraging revellers to “Please scream inside your heart.” I. Cannot. Deal.
For the next six months, we are on the Fujiyama, enduring and enjoying our re-introduction to campus life. Patience with ourselves, our colleagues and students will be essential as we adapt to the evolving conditions. With the metaphor tucked into the corner of the 2-person restricted office, we will be prepared for the slow creeps, the exhilarating plunges and the camaraderie with everyone who also feels slightly out of control of the situation…. while screaming in our hearts.
1. Get and use mantra: tick.
2. Remember patience: tick.
Next, we also will benefit from a skill that allows us to hold two opposing viewpoints in our minds. Termed both/and thinking, it serves us better than the more decisive, binary either/or options. For example, acknowledging that I feel BOTH glad to see my colleagues AND exhausted is okay. To admit to BOTH bouts of endless despair AND deep gratitude in the same second: expected.
3. Apply And/ Both Thinking: tick.
I also highly recommend Pauline Boss’s body of work on ambiguous loss. Ambiguous loss is a loss that occurs without closure or clear understanding. Originally described as occurring when a loved one is physically present but psychologically absent (such a caring for someone with dementia), or psychologically present but physically absent (a soldier who is missing in action). This kind of loss leaves a person searching for answers and offers little in terms of closure or resolution. In our culture or problem-solving, we all are geared for, and consumed with winning (at best), mastery (at least) and containment (worst case scenario) and yet, here we are in a pandemic that on a individual, family and now societal level, leaves us without closure, understanding or answers: there are deaths that could not be mourned, dramatic changes to our daily routines and weekly structures, as well as a sense of threat to what was, less than 6 months ago, solid careers and aspirations. Because it doesn’t meet the more traditional criteria of grief, we run the risk of underestimating the impact of this kind of grieving on our daily living. It is exhausting to grieve; it is consuming to grieve; and it is deserving of our best self-care efforts.
Ambiguous loss may be a helpful inclusion in our cultural grief vocabulary as we live with, and through the pandemic. It will allow us to compassionately examine and place language around our unhelpful stress-inducing assumptions about how we should be feeling and acting. It will help us understand our triggers, and to frame our responses and assessments of ourselves through a lens of grieving, instead of being confused and ashamed by our reactions. (For more on this topic, and an introduction to Pauline Boss: https://onbeing.org/programs/pauline-boss-navigating-loss-without-closure/).
Mark Nepo’s poignant Joining the Circus captures it perfectly for me: the roller coaster, the screaming in your heart, the patience, the ambiguity, the ever-present lump in my throat and the precious beauty in it all:
I just saw a handwritten note from
Galileo. He was under house arrest
for believing we’re not the center of
everything. Now behind me, in the park,
a dozen beginners, of all ages, learning
how to juggle. We have to start somewhere.
The young man who’s magical is asked to
instruct. He smiles, “You have to keep
trying. Just not the same thing.” Earlier,
I leaned over a letter from Lincoln to a
dead soldier’s mother. This, just weeks
after losing Susan’s mother, sweet
Eleanor. I keep saying her name to
strangers. You see, we all have to
juggle joy and sorrow. Not to do it
well – we always drop something – but
when the up and down of life are
leaving one hand and not yet landing
in the other, then we glow, like
a mystical molecule hovering between
birth and death, ready to kiss anything.
My very bravest face, and kindest wishes for a great Semester,
Dunay
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