Covid-19 Corona Virus has accomplished in three months what spiritual leaders and governments have sought for centuries: bond communities into common connections, heighten mindfulness, encourage empathy.
So here we sit with extra boxes of pasta in our bravado little bubbles, passing along the latest information, and urgent thoughts and support for one another. Have you had the emails from worried kids with admonitions and pleas to cancel trips and take care? Have your conversations included — if not begun with — “Corona”? Since December 2019, nearly five million searches, inclusion in every newscast all day long, and near daily updates from authorities have dramatically increased the email exchanges among loved ones (I’m guessing). But it’s human nature to connect to others in time of need; isolation is akin to smoking 15 cigarettes a day (I’m not guessing – Brigham Young University study).
As nursing and assisted living homes close their doors this week to lock out the killer contagion, it could also open the window to alternative communication! Grand-kids should pick up their phones to make a real voice-to-voice call. Send an old-fashioned funny greeting card. Print off that photo before uploading it, and send it to someone who is feeling more lonely and scared than ever. Every retirement and nursing home, assisted living facility and homeless shelter should have tablet computers as available as soup! And some easy way to attract and show elders how easy it is to see their hometown paper or answers to their most random question. There are good simple training programs, such as (and I’m clearly biased) the free self-guided app Easy Tablet Help for Seniors
But think how much you, yourself, are watching, using, checking, sending — online — in this crisis. Isn’t it heartbreaking to imagine the isolation spreading exponentially among the more confined?
Here’s to short-lived problems, long-lived family, and well-lived lives!!!!
Josie Fletcher at Surrey Senior Center sending her first text to her loving granddaughter
Thanks to the wonderful Wikipedia- to which we should all send contributions.