Not so long ago, Seth Godin summed up the human challenge with accurately judging short- and long-term rewards in the question, “When is this a good idea?”

The intuition is easy to grasp in daily life: this pint of ice cream, this road rage, this credit card debt … when is this a good idea?

The question has also been echoing in my head in the past week’s reading: this testing program, this quarantine, this helicopter money … when is this a good idea?

As with credit-card debt, the problem with systems with no slack built into them is that it gets harder and harder to catch up. Today’s responses are obvious and necessary (if desperately uncoordinated and lethally late), but we’ll be living with the repercussions for a very long time.

It’s much too soon to come out of quarantine. But it’s not too soon at all to think deeply about what sort of new normal we want to build.

To paraphrase Seth again, the best time to think about that was a year or a decade or two ago. But the second-best time is right now.

Colin: So, how long have you been in quarantine?

Also Colin: Two weeks exactly.

Wow. How are you doing?

Funny how that most reflexive, inane question is now so loaded, isn’t it?

Mmm.

“Two weeks in quarantine.” There’s a sentence I never hoped or expected to utter. But as for how it’s going, I can’t complain. I have a place to live, food, water, and internet. And we just got a small resupply box yesterday. I haven’t been so happy about a new t-shirt and a fresh pair of socks since I spent a month in the Wyoming backcountry.

Small victories, eh?

Goodness knows I’ve read enough books about people in extremis and the behavioral psychology of more mundane existence, and they all seem to agree that a lot of little wins is the way through. A month ago, waking up healthy was so expected as to be taken for granted. These days, it’s a win. And, if there’s a clean pair of socks to wear, it’s a win-win-win-win.

Right: you’ve got three people with you in corona camp.

Yep. One of them I was planning to move in with. We did that, but our stuff is still mostly in boxes in our new apartment. We’re two weeks into a weekend to catch our breaths — hence the limited sock selection. The other two (plus their cat) kind of came with the deal.

How are you managing?

As lightly as possible.

[Stares]

C’mon, I can be kinda overbearing if I’m not careful. Ask my brothers. But, once again, I’m grateful for NOLS. After four weeks sharing tents and camp kitchens with rotating groups of four, sharing an entire house with a floor for each couple and another in common is no bother. And I miss having a gas stove, but five burners, two ovens, and a sink is really hard to argue with. And that’s not to mention the coffee maker or the beer fridge.

Yeah, I’d take the house, too.

We also have the ultimate COVID commodity — toilet paper. We haven’t had to resort to rocks, leaves, or snowballs yet in this house. Snowballs can be luxurious, by the way.

I was wondering, but I wasn’t asking.

Happy to share.

This is starting to sound idyllic, to be honest.

Well, it’s like being imprisoned in paradise. You can’t beat the view, but you also can’t change it that much. Ditto the company: it’s the Groundhog Day of dinner parties. Since “quarantine” sounds a lot more clinical than our situation feels, I’ve taken to calling it extrovert hell.

Right. But you kept wishing for a slower pace, extra sleep, and time to write.

C’mon. We all wish for a slower pace till we get it. The gods punish men by granting their wishes too completely. Look at me: this blog used to rail against meetings and now it’s creative writing class.

What’s the worst part?

Easy: having to organize and occupy my days. I think and write about that a lot, but it’s really hard. Darn near broke me when I first tried it by accident a year and a half ago. Now the rest of the world is getting a taste of the peculiar joys of working from home.

Best part? There’s got to be one.

That’s harder to choose. We’re outrageously lucky. But I’ve got to go with quarter-ounce packets of active yeast.

Active yeast?

I wasn’t much of a baker till I had hours to practice every day. And sure, truly great bread is a magical, ineffable art form. But do you know how easy it is to make pretty-damn-good bread in your own kitchen? There are only four ingredients, and the one that’s least familiar to most of us is sold in little pre-measured packets for the price of about two slices of Pepperidge Farm. How great is that?

Pretty great, apparently.

It is. But it’s not as great as the sort of crack in the universe.

The what?

You know, the one Leonard Cohen sang about: “It’s how the light gets in.”

You’re cracked. Go on.

This quarantine business might be extrovert hell, but it’s actual hell for an awful lot of people out there right now, right? And it’s likely to go on for a while, unfortunately. We can’t take that lightly for a second. But it’s also extraordinary to see how things are changing. People are stepping up. They’re learning to live with and for each other. A crisis can sure clear out a lot of cruft, and this is a biggie.

No doubt. But how does this work?

Well, I think we’ve got to be mindful about it. But consider what’s happened already: Healers and teachers are international heroes, as they always should have been and should be forevermore. Kids are mostly spared, which is a miracle in plain sight. We’re all getting a stiff lesson in how little control we really have. (If you thought 2018 or 2019 was “volatile and uncertain,” how about this?) And, incidentally, we’re finally learning that the technologies of communication are actually pretty good.

So … ?

So what I’m trying to point at here is, what if we tried to connect the dots? What if flying to New Zealand went back to being the miracle it is rather than a layup for anyone who can scrape together a couple thousand bucks? What if we started taking workers seriously as parents and teachers, too? (We’ll never un-see all the other demands on people’s lives.) What if we remembered for more than two seconds that real connection is truly valuable? What if we saw it might even be economical?

That’s a lot to ask.

If now ain’t the time to ask a lot, I pray we don’t see a “better” one.

Well, we’ve certainly asked a lot of the audience. Any idea when you’ll get out?

Nope. As ever — only more so — we’ll make the best decision we can with the information we’ve got.

Should we expect more creative writing class in the meantime?

Maybe. I’ve got plenty of time.

Oh boy. Well, thanks for this time. And stay healthy.

Stay home!

I was part of a good conversation on this yesterday, which clarified something about the transition to near-universal work-from-home for me:

Part of it is easy change. Most people can learn to use Zoom pretty effectively in a week, and have done so.

But part of it is hard change. Organizing and occupying yourself day after week after month is not so easy. Hosting or joining a Zoom isn’t too tough, but deciding which ones are really worthwhile or necessary might be a real challenge. And of course it only goes on from there.

Hard change is hard. That’s why you’re not as organized or productive or effective as you want to be already. If it were easy, there wouldn’t be a multi-gazillion-dollar self-help industry.

But it is possible to do hard things, or to learn to live with the ones that elude us.

The question isn’t, Will I be supremely organized forever after by the end of this crisis?

It’s more like, What’s the best use of my attention and energy now and next?

An irresponsible statement to be sure, and unlikely to happen in any case.

But, in its own strange way, a reminder that we’re in the midst of Lent, the season of self-imposed privation — a time when we’re invited to forego, to practice living with less, to accept a small taste of discomfort as a reminder of the world’s great suffering.

It’s interesting how that message never comes through, isn’t it?

The epidemiological case for staying shut down tight seems pretty clear. Perhaps we’d better focus on that if we want to have any hope of returning to any semblance of normal life (economic as well as social) by Easter time.

What would you do if you knew it wouldn’t pay?

Assuming for a moment that you have a roof over your head and food on the table — a big assumption in a country where nearly half of us don’t have even a few hundred dollars available to cover an unexpected expense — this is a magical time to do things with an expected value of $0.

Not nothing, as in literally no value, but merely zero dollars.

It’s a great time to build attention, trust, and connection. It’s a great time to do some community service. It’s a great time to move closer to 10,000 hours (perhaps in a new or unusual direction). It’s a great time to practice crafts that bring joy but not income.

This isn’t to minimize the effects of lost income, which are already being terribly felt.

It is merely to say that attention and trust and connection are there for the making, and that learning how to make those happen tends to pay off handsomely over the long run — in every sense.

Some days are just like that, aren’t they?

Luckily, another day brings another opportunity.

No matter how yesterday went, another (healthy) day is another chance to make a difference.

Last week was the week of adjusting to the new normal.

This week is the beginning of the new normal as normal — not forever, but for the time being.

Last week was marked by an extremely generous outpouring of connections, virtual gatherings, and other efforts to ease the transition.

This week is a good time to take stock: how much gathering (initiating or joining) is energizing vs. draining? How much work is realistic to do in a day, and what schedules and systems will enable any of us to do what must (and can) be done?

Exuberance is natural at the beginning, but this is looking like a stamina game.

If you want to be around for — and a part of — what’s next, how will you manage your attention and energy and care and initiative through this time?

The single best piece of writing I’ve read this past week is a poem: “Pandemic,” by Lynn Ungar.

(It’s been making the rounds online, but I’ve linked to Steve Pressfield’s blog, where I first saw it.)

This is a good time to be contemplative, and I hope many people take the invitation.

But everyone is also going to have to keep managing their lives, too — especially as we all settle into the long haul of quarantine.

Hence, two resources from the always amazing Naomi Dunford, to help with coping at home and work:

• The first post on her new blog, about eating prepared food sanely and well
• Her Emergency Turnaround Course 1.0, as originally produced and released during the great recession and now freely available to all

Stay safe and sane out there.

***

PS: We’re gathering people and resources, too. We’d love to have you join us.

Humanity is in crisis. But we’re not the only passengers on spaceship earth, are we?

In my own little escape pod in the woods, we’ve been wondering aloud how the natural and animal worlds are seeing or responding to the human emergency.

Do they know? What do they know?

I have no idea. But I do know that a fisher went by the window in broad daylight, and the cat’s a bit stranger than usual, and there are fish and swans and dolphins in Venice for the first time in ages, and even the notoriously polluted air in China is clearing up.

As we wait desperately for a return to a new normal, you kind of have to wonder if the fishers in the woods outside my window and the fishes in the canals in Venice and a lot of other creatures in a lot of other places aren’t feeling some kind of longed-for relief now themselves.

Everyone I know who is still able to do so is taking long walks these days, appreciating places and paces they haven’t enjoyed in forever.

The evidence of the destructiveness of the old normal is fast becoming obvious. When humanity emerges from this crisis, what sort of humanity, exactly, will we be?

Almost exactly one year ago, I was invited to join the Akimbo Workshops coach team.

And for the first 11 months or so, I got a lot of questions about what it meant and what it was like to work in asynchronous, global teams of people I’ve never met and may never meet in analog form.

In the past week, of course, working from home has become nearly ubiquitous — and it’s likely to remain so for at least several more weeks.

Having ridden the rollercoaster of an unexpected transition to working from home over the past year, here are some notes on the experience.

• It sounds easy, but it’s not. In an average day at the office, many of us would do anything for a shorter commute, a more flexible schedule, or some additional breathing space. After a week of being cooped up at home, most of us are ready to climb the walls.
• The transition happens in stages. Under the best of circumstances, the first week or so might feel like a snow day. After that, withdrawal symptoms start to show up: from routine, from scheduling, and especially from social interactions.
• The antidotes to withdrawal are connection, collaboration, and compassion. There’s plenty of advice out there already about what to wear and where to work. Most people will figure that out pretty naturally. What might not come so naturally is to see the opportunity to create connections — and to do just that.

Most of all, for workers and especially managers in larger organizations, this is a really, really important time to be mindful, intentional, and flexible about what exactly business continuity is going to look and feel like.

If we’re not careful, “business continuity” sounds like a case for replicating the office experience as closely as possible. Business must and will continue, but this isn’t just a snow day: this is everyone adjusting on the fly to living, working, parenting, teaching, and socializing from home. Different people and organizations and tasks are different, and they’re going to need to be treated differently.

Welcome to the end of the first week. How did it go? How do you want next week to go? And what are you going to do to make that happen?

***

More (evolving) thoughts here — including a library of helpful, humorous, and healing readings. Please and enjoy and share.

And, most of all, stay healthy and sane out there.