What If Change Is the Comfort You Seek? Some Thoughts on Personal Need Fulfillment in Troubling Times
A first attempt at sanity during COVID: the homeschool schedule I made for my son on day one of the shut-down. Best laid plans…
Friday, March 13, 2020: that, my friends, was my last day in normal land. We knew the pandemic was coming, but everyone was still at work and school was still in session where I lived. My son had a Pi Day celebration in his class, and I had taken the day off so I could serve slices of grocery store pie and teach math skills to him and his classmates. Bottles of hand sanitizer were in heavy use, but we were blissfully clueless about the real ball that was about to drop. By the weekend, school was cancelled for the foreseeable future, and my family and everyone I knew was in COVID limbo.
Since then, too, we have been on quite the roller coaster ride, haven’t we? It seems almost too obvious to mention, but on top of the pandemic and the incredible loss of human life we have suffered, over the last two years we have experienced an economic downturn, social upheaval, political turmoil, climate catastrophes, and now the war in Ukraine.
It’s enough to make anyone want to give up and just curl into a ball, and no doubt some of that is warranted, as well, perhaps along with a big bowl of pasta with meatballs, homemade bread, a bottle of wine, and three batches of cookies…or chocolate cake…or elaborate Viennese pastries from scratch. At least, that was the way it was in my household (admittedly a pretty lucky and privileged one) when the pandemic first started, and we were clinging to anything that seemed like it might give comfort or relieve the boredom.
What if, though, the comfort we need in times of strife can be found more readily elsewhere? As I slowly found out, all that “comfort” wasn’t actually what I needed or continue to need as the roller coaster ride continues. While the food and the nesting masqueraded as comfort, it mostly just ended up making me feel tired and sick.
The truth is our needs are far too profound for any warm blanket, bottle of wine, or batch of cookies to fill. We need things like connection, safety, purpose, freedom, and understanding. We need to be creative and work our brains. We need to move our bodies and eat foods that truly nourish us. We need to heal.
Maybe the answers to our problems, then, might come instead from attending to these needs through positive change, not just in spite of, but especially because of what we are enduring. Our needs haven’t necessarily changed, but the world has, and this requires significant lifestyle pivots in order to ensure our emotional and physical needs continue to be met. I’ll give you a personal example.
Hiking with family while social distancing, April 2020.
Somewhat unconsciously, in the spring of 2020, I made it my project to systematically fulfill my needs even though all my usual outlets for doing so were out of reach. My work, which took me in and out of people’s houses all day, had slowed to a trickle. I was stressed out and at a loss for what to do with much of my time. The first thing I did, then, was focus on keeping myself stimulated and a little less anxious. After a long hiatus from the mat, I started practicing yoga again daily using the Glo app, and my family made a point of walking the dog twice a day together and going on hikes on the weekend. I also sought out new learning opportunities. In the beginning, these opportunities were direct from the cocoon: I started cooking and baking all kinds of recipes I had never made before and binge-watched arts programming and documentaries (along with plenty of not-so-enriching, but certainly entertaining Netflix series). I also took an online contact tracing course, thinking that might be a way I could make a difference in the pandemic.
The biggest, and most life-changing moves I made came a few months into quarantine, though. I had taken baby steps to take care of my needs, and they were worthwhile experiments, but they weren’t the actions that were going to serve me for the long haul. They were easy wins that gave me the confidence to tackle much greater challenges. Ultimately, the two things that got me through 2020 and continue to fill me up every day were signing up for and completing the wellness coach training course at Wellcoaches (a dream I had fostered since 2015), and then switching to a plant-based diet. The Wellcoaches course gave me purpose, achievement, stimulation, and community in one fell swoop. Going plant-based helped me feel truly healthy again. By taking on these projects, I gained some real control over my wellness and the chaos of COVID life for the long term, and I also grew in ways I never would have expected.
All in all, it was because of the pandemic that I finally took these major steps. It was the difficulty of my situation that prompted me to make big changes, the changes that I can now look back on as the upside to everything I went through in 2020.
Everyone manages their needs in different ways, and everyone’s needs are different, but for me troubling times were a catalyst for change, and change that really made a meaningful difference in my quality of life. Perhaps, perhaps they might be for you, too.