Yes, today is Passover. And no, we won’t all be raring out of quarantine on Sunday.

[New factoid learned just yesterday: “quarantine” comes from 40 days — symbolically, a Very Long Time, hence Lent.]

But now is as good a time as any to consider the great mysteries and everyday miracles of this world:

The turning of the seasons, and the inevitability of spring.

The possibility of renewal.

The way that the life that was can end, can endure quarantine, and begin again, transformed.

***

Several years ago, Seth Godin, Alex Peck, and others assembled the Thanksgiving Reader — a collection of readings, reflections, and questions to share around a table during the best holiday of the year.

This Easter, my friend Emily and I created a renewal-themed version.

Please consider it an invitation to gather and reflect with those who matter, in a medium that works, at a time that’s meaningful to you. Make it fit your tradition, or make up a new tradition.

After all, we’ve got a good routine for harvest time. Why not springtime, too?

Enjoy a copy, share a copy, and stay healthy … every “quarantine” comes to an end sometime.

PS: You can also find and share the document here.

PPS: RIP John Prine, a national treasure. As long as we’re on the Easter theme, enjoy “The Missing Years.”

“Now is the time to be slow,” wrote the poet John O’Donohue.

And there’s no doubt about that. As the first frenetic weeks of lockdown and lock-in turn seriously into the long haul (for who knows how long), the pace should necessarily slow.

And in that slowing is the invitation to consider who and what we want to become on the other side.

We don’t know when we’ll get there, but it’s a good bet we’ll be plenty busy when we do — too busy, in all likelihood, to contemplate and decide then what we ought to be contemplating and deciding now.

Multiple people observed to me last week that they can no longer find a meaningful superlative or word to describe their work.

“Empowered,” for example, used to mean something.

“Leverage” and “impact” were both nouns with specific uses and connotations.

Now, of course, it’s hard to find an organization (or person referring to themselves in the plural) that’s not leveraging impact for empowerment.

Debasing is very difficult to recover from.

Luckily, at least in language, it’s possible to coin new words when the old are well and truly worthless.

Now that’s leverage.

The best reads of the week:

(1) “The Coronation,” by Charles Eisenstein. This has been making the rounds on the internet, and it’s worth serious consideration, whether or not it’s correct to the last detail.

(2) The always-erudite Farnam Street on finding and practicing what you truly value. (For many, including me, it’s learning to bake.)

(3) The recent museletters (hoho, what a wonderful title!) of Dr. Jason Fox.

(4) This offering from my good and wise friend Emily Ávila.

Enjoy, and stay healthy.

Someone recently reintroduced me to the Taoist concept of wu-wei, loosely translated as doing nothing.

Not doing nothing in the sense of pure idleness or sloth, but in the sense of not intervening or spinning one’s wheels or seeking to control where control is either inadvisable or impossible.

It’s as good a day as any to be quiet and not do so much, in the midst of a long string of days of not doing so much as we might be used to.

Doing literally nothing probably isn’t feasible or desirable, but what a chance to really pause and reconsider what’s truly worth doing and why.

Strictly speaking, quarantine isn’t exactly zero-basing.

But it’s as close as we’re likely to get (and we might get even closer before it’s all said and done).

Wherever you’re holed up and whatever you’re working on, you’ve almost certainly had a change of scene and routine.

The question is, what would you add back when that’s possible? And which parts of the new routine will turn out to be worth protecting when they’re no longer a matter of self- and social protection?

My friend Emily just produced an amazing piece of art. She describes it as an offering, but I’d say it’s even more of an invitation — to get quieter and go deeper into what this time is and might become, and what we as people and as a species are and might become.

Reading it, I was reminded of something Fr. Richard Rohr often says: “There’s no direct flight from order to re-order. We have to go through disorder along the way.

Everyone’s talking about disorder right now, but almost exclusively in terms of the old order that no longer is, or the re-order that has not yet become real.

No one knows how long this layover is going to be. But the longer this goes on, the bigger the invitation to consider where we came from and where we’d like to go next.

It could be a cruel cosmic joke. (But it’s really epidemiology meeting humanity.)

It could be fake news. (But, of course, it’s all too real.)

Silliest of all, it could be a conspiracy. (But the only premeditated evil was unpreparedness.)

It might be a rhyme of history. (2020 is uncomfortably close to 1918.)

Or it could be an enormous invitation: to see ourselves in larger context, to see life as it really is, to see our own complicity, to see what happened in the years and decades after 1918 and to determine we don’t want to rhyme with any of that.

We could see all that, but we have to see the invitation first.

No kidding.

Twenty years ago, we had the meme of friendships formed in Internet chat rooms. Some met in real life, some didn’t. Some of those who met in real life made a healthy transition to analog, some didn’t.

I was a little young for that, and frankly a bit scornful of the idea that people would get together with someone they knew only as DarkAura123. Didn’t they know better?

Looking back, it’s easy to see how I missed the joke. I was basically a non-participant, and not only because I was too young. I never even had a screen name, so it was easy to caricature the “DarkAuras” of the online world and whatever real-world misadventures they had that were newsworthy enough to cross my radar.

The internet has come a long way since then. In some parts, the aura has gotten noticeably and undeniably darker. In other parts, people interact with their real names and with video on.

And once I started doing that, I finally saw the elephant. By now, I’ve worked with and for people I’ve only ever seen on video. And I’ve had conversations and formed friendships with plenty of others — some of whom I’ve also met in real life.

During those two decades, in-person meetings have also gotten a lot easier. We got RyanAir and EasyJet alongside Gmail, shared documents, and Zoom, so it was easy to feel connected physically as well as digitally, and for a lot of people to go on treating digital connections as less convenient or genuine or effective than in-person ones.

I’m not about to argue that Zoom is exactly the same as in-person interactions, but I think we’re all learning a lot about our reliance on the local communities we’ve largely neglected as well as the possibilities we can create online.

Two weeks ago, I co-hosted a Zoom breakfast in which the guests comprised two friend groups — some personal, some professional, and some friends of friends. Most of these people have never met in real life and probably won’t. But they might never have met online, either, if we hadn’t all wanted to stretch ourselves a bit.

But I still don’t know the people at the grocery store downtown who sold me the ingredients for our part of the breakfast. And I’m a guest in their town, consuming real and scarce resources in a frightened time after the end of the usual tourist season.

No matter how long this lasts, we won’t forget the memory of global connection — at least digitally. Chances are, we’ll only get better at it. Online-only connections might lose the dark aura that lingers for many people who weren’t often or primarily online before.

But it seems there’s also a big and important invitation to get more connected to the people we can reach out and touch — and whom we’ve finally found ourselves actually living with.

As everyone’s been learning to use Zoom, I’ve been interested by how many times I’ve heard two comments. The first is how good it is — how easily and how closely it feels possible to approximate in-person meetings. The second is how many people are suddenly feeling eyestrain because of how much time they’re spending online.

What intrigues me in all this is how many uses we’re demanding of and devising for the same venue. Some weeks ago, most of us would have felt out of place hosting a dinner party in a conference room or a work meeting in a dining room. Now, Zoom is for both Friday night and Monday morning.

This requires some creativity and dexterity, and it makes me wonder what we’ll go “back” to on the other side.

Whatever it is, I hope it still includes dinner parties across multiple time zones.