The Knowing

I doubt that I am alone in feeling this feeling today.

The news of closures and precautions and viral pandemic are blazing across my phone, my watch, the tv, our dinner table, and in the eyes of everyone I meet.

The experts don’t know, the doctors, the therapists, the journalists, the authors, my friends, my kids, they don’t know. Because this level of global shut down has not happened in our lifetime — certainly not in mine.

Yet through all the unknowing, I feel a weird calm — except when I read the article on the front page to the New York Times this morning about two guys in Tennessee (along with thousands of others) who went out and bought 17,700 bottles of hand sanitizer and began to resell it for $70 a piece. That’s just gross.

But now I’m calm again, because Amazon and EBay have cut them off. Karma is real.

Calm is not the same as indifferent. I know people are in pain, in fear, and suffering. I know there is a world of unknown about to hit our finances, businesses, and bodies.

So what I’m going to do is stop looking for someone else to tell me the right thing to do. It’s clear that this is spreading and I don’t want to make it worse by pretending I know something about it that I don’t know.

I’m going to stop. Breathe. Be still. Listen. Do the next right thing.

As Glennon Doyle has beautifully written in Untamed:

HOW TO KNOW:
Moment of uncertainty arises
Breathe, turn inward, sink.
Feel around for the Knowing.
Do the next thing it nudges you toward.
Let is stand. (Don’t explain.)
Repeat forever.
(For the rest of your life: Continue to shorten the gap between the Knowing and the doing.)