Today I read one of the most helpful articles on dealing with COVID 19 in The Harvard Business Review.  Staff’s shared reflections about their collective “queasy, anxious” feelings lead to an interview with noted expert on grief, David Kessler.

This is a time to overprotect but not overreact.

Kessler, the author of Finding Meaning: the Sixth Stage of Grief and founder of grief.com shares his thoughts about why it is so important to acknowledge and name what we’re feeling as grief, and then, to deal with it:

The truth is a feeling moves through us. We feel it and it goes and then we go to the next feeling. There’s no gang out to get us. It’s absurd to think we shouldn’t feel grief right now. Let yourself feel the grief and keep going.

You can find the link to the Harvard Business Review full interview here. 

In closing, I’m reminded of the old adage, “if you can name it, you can deal with it.”

Although we face a crisis of vast proportion it may help to remember that, well, civilization has been here before.  Not perhaps in this exact landscape, but, the legacies of generations past are rife with narratives of hardship, struggle, grit, luck and remarkable courage in the face of disaster.

Recently, someone was feeling a bit this way when a small bookshop in the UK posted this message to Twitter prior to shuttering  its doors:

As we close for a while a thought about seclusion. In 1942 a 13 year old girl , her family and 4 strangers hid from the Nazis is a small attic . They had little food and had to stay quiet. They survived for 2 years.