Obsessive fear won’t keep us safe. Neither will glib denial.

Coronavirus: Time to Take a Breath

Let’s know what we can know and let go of the rest.

Image courtesy of Adobestock.com

It’s been hard to think about anything else. Rarely have I been so obsessed with the news, checking it every half hour. I have dear friends and some family in Northern Italy who are trapped in their homes. I have friends in Kirkland, Washington where the first U. S. Coronavirus death took place. My niece lives in Northern California, and a new case was just confirmed in her county.

My mind has been spinning out at an alarming rate. Trying to imagine futures impossible to imagine, reading about the Spanish flu pandemic in 1918, trying to project what would I do if my family were hit.

That’s when I realized that while all of this is normal, none of it is helping.

Or course we’re all worried. Of course, there’s built-in anxiety when you join together a deadly virus with a host of unknowns. When we’re worried about something we don’t know, we get busy filling in the blanks. It’s what we do. Sometimes we even make stuff up.

And then we believe it. We talk to each other, compare notes, and sometimes get even scarier ideas. And…