Our Real Power

We cannot forget that our real power is not necessarily to change the world, but to make a world of change to the people we encounter every day. ~ Cory Booker

Last Thursday morning while I was out on a bike ride I got a call from a friend here in the park, “I have some bad news.” I knew what she was going to say. “I just tested positive for Covid.”

We had been together for a couple of hours the prior evening at the Glenairs Jam. Linda and Larry were not there but when I told her the news she sent me the current Covid exposure guidelines from the CDC.

After being exposed to COVID-19 START PRECAUTIONS IMMEDIATELY. Wear a mask as soon as you find out you were exposed.

Start counting from day 1. Day 0 is the day of your last exposure to someone with COVID-19, and day 1 is the first full day after your last exposure.

CONTINUE PRECAUTIONS 10 full day because you can still develop COVID-19 up to 10 days after you have been exposed.

Wear a high-quality mask or respirator (e.g., N95) any time you are around others inside your home or indoors in public.

John cancelled his pool match with Charlie on Thursday and his practice music session with John Smith on Saturday, and he stayed home from coffee. I wore a mask when Linda Allen and Princess and I went for a bike ride, and during any errands I ran. We canceled our Saturday plans for the taco-bar-birthday celebration with my sister, Janis, and our brother-in-love, Larry, the birthday boy.

This morning I was catching up on emails and read about how rather than developing skills for drawing on our inner resources, many of us developed skills for looking outward and reacting to whatever confronted us. Earlier in the week I got twisted up with our friend who hosts the jam sessions. He and his wife obviously were not isolating. Admittedly, they were on the other side of the room the evening of our exposure, but he said he believed they were exposed so their choice for navigating is deeper than where in the room they were on Wednesday.

I am surprised that I am quite the stickler about following the guidelines because I am generally more of a rule-breaker than a rule-follower. (Common Metaprograms from the personality preferences in SCS/NLP.) Of course, you cannot do one without simultaneously doing the other. They reside in pairs – opposite ends of a continuum, just like heads and tails on a coin.

I am not paranoid about Covid any more. I was. But I do not want to get ill or to be sick, and even more than that, I don’t want to knowingly expose someone else. For me, it is an easy choice to experience the frustration of missing something I was looking forward to.

After I got twisted up with our friend, I later got twisted up with our daughter, Stacey, about having gotten twisted up with our friend. Both of them used the exact same words that sent me over the edge: “It is just like flu.” Well, that is not how I see it….

So, I read a book.

I did a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle. The title of this one was “Fun Fair Foods” and I made hamburgers for our dinner that night. LOL.

I painted the deck box that sits on the front porch the same powder blue of our barn.

Yesterday’s project was beautiful, bright new paint and hardware on the vanity in the guest bathroom.

The book I read was Beaches, by Iris Rainer Dart. It is about two women who met as children on a beach during a summer vacation and how they first became pen pals, then life-long friends. As the stable one in the relationship was dying of cancer (SPOILER ALERT), the drama-queen stepped up to support her friend but over-stepped by bringing the woman’s young daughter there to be with her mom against the mom’s wishes.

Needless to say, that did not go over well, with the friend saying essentially,”You had no right. I hate you. Get out of my house, I never want to see you again as long as I live.”

The flamboyant-bordering-on-hystrionic friend’s calm response brought me a laugh mingled with a couple of tears: “I am glad you are the crazy one for a change.”

Grateful to report that we have both tested negative for Covid, have no symptoms, and we are approaching the ten-day mark.

Sometimes it is better to step over an obstacle than to try to go around a difficult situation. That may be our real power….