Care of the Soul in a Time of Grieving

Along with the very real loss of income so many of our neighbors are experiencing because of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the very real anxiety that loss of livelihood produces, I also want to address a different kind of grief -- the loss of identity.

My work is interacting with rooms full of people. I have been a professor of philosophy for thirty years. For many hours a day I run groups of 45 students, leading them through a guided inquiry into the life-changing insights of the world's wisdom traditions. My tools? My voice, my face, my hands, my body, my mind, my heart, and my words. I tell stories. I make analogies. I cajole, I hover, I lead, I follow, I ask, I tell, I show, I wonder, I weave metaphors, I wax poetic, I orate, I preach, I pace, I stammer, I sing.

All of that is gone. Now I am forced to hammer all of that into screen and keyboard transactions. Every class is an online class now.

Experienced distance education (DE) instructors create highly interactive and engaging online classes, or so I'm told by people committed to online teaching. But in my years of informal surveying, most students see DE as merely a means to an end. What they love about it is the convenience -- no class meetings, no buses, no driving, no parking, no tardies. I have never met a student who preferred online education to face to face. DE is educational triage for students who for any number of reasons cannot attend traditional class schedules -- mothers of young children, 9 to 5ers, deployed military members, and now, pandemic isolators.

All of my judgements about online education should be viewed with great suspicion. I just don't know enough about it yet. I am a DE outsider. Here in the infancy of my abilities as a DE instructor I'm coming face to face with my woeful inexperience and deep ignorance as to how to use DEs many tools. So I feel pretty lost and pretty stupid. But there's something deeper going on, beyond simple technological frustration.

I'm grieving. I'm grieving the loss of my way of life, my life's work, my identity as a public speaker, as a weaver of spells with words and ideas. Canvas announcements, video snippets, discussion threads, and digital quizzes are a profoundly impoverished way of "interacting" compared to the living, breathing communion of an actual classroom. Human beings have been learning and teaching face to face for hundreds of thousands of years. That is a hard habit to break.

I know my students are feeling it too. And there's not a damn thing any of us can do about it. We didn't even get to say goodbye.

None of this amounts to anything near the hardship so many of my friends in the culinary/restaurant/bar/nightclub world are experiencing. Or any of my many friends in the arts -- singers, musicians, actors, and all the production support surrounding the performing arts. They've lost their identities AND their income. At least I'm still getting paid, well, for my Southwestern College job anyway. I've lost thousands in off-campus gig work already. But I can weather that. It's the grief that's getting me.

Now is also not the time for sunny speeches about gratitude, or looking on the bright side, or not giving in to fear. People are raw. People are scared. People are lost. Things are falling apart. Be with that. Let that be true. Move through it with hearts and eyes wide open.

We can talk about Phoenix rising from the ashes later. What this is is the great burning down.

So know that everyone is hurting. Know that behind the "funny" memes and the brave faces there is confusion, fear, sorrow, and grief. We're all adrift and no one can see the shore.

Our physical health is in jeopardy. We're all taking precautionary measures to avoid infection, and to slow the infection rate so that others may survive. But now is also time for the care of the soul. Follow your soul down into the Center. The soul holds secrets, wisdom, and music we rarely hear. Listen. It will lead you through this dark forest, no matter how badly we stumble and sway down this path we cannot even see. Don't try to manage your soul -- let your soul manage you. Like a river, it knows the way.