The Great Recalibration
What 10 full weeks of extreme stay-at-home taught me.
On March 17th, the San Francisco Bay Area moved into lockdown amid the pandemic. Three days before that, on March 14th, I began sheltering-in-place.
Since then, I have not left my property once — until this weekend.
The result of this extreme stay-at-home? I’ve lost 15+ pounds, and feel more balanced, present, patient, and self-aware than ever. Honestly, this period has been the healthiest of my adult life.
And so, as this weekend marks the first time that I’ve left my apartment after 10 full weeks, I wanted to pause for a moment to express how this period of dramatic reset has affected me. In doing so, I hope to integrate its lessons and practices as I begin to slowly reemerge “out there.”
Perhaps something I write will resonate with you. That would be wonderful, and I would love to hear your story of reset and recalibration from this period as well. But to be candid, the intended audience of this letter is myself: I need this. Perhaps that is why it feels so vulnerable to publish.
This letter is my attempt to honor these past 70 days of sacred reset, and to ponder what this expanse of time and space has stirred within me on a very personal level. I usually find it easier to put my work and my concerns for others at the forefront. Here, I am going to attune to myself.
I’ll focus on four questions that I want to be able to remember and live into for the rest of my life.
- Where did I spend my time?
- How was I able to do this?
- Why did I feel this was necessary?
- What did I learn?
Where did I spend my time?
After 10 weeks of staying-at-home, I can count 10 new practices and rhythms that managed to migrate from long-standing intentions to actual daily routines. These 10 new practices fueled my reset AND energized me through very intense 8–10 hour workdays, helping me sleep 6–8 hours most nights, and freeing me up for plenty of time to be spontaneous, to explore, and to connect.
- I walked 8–9 miles every day (mostly while on phone calls in my driveway and side yard)
- I made almost every meal (skipping restaurants is the main reason for the weight loss)
- I ate the same meals daily for breakfast/lunch; for dinner, I alternated between 3–4 meals
- I practiced yoga every morning (thank you Cat Meffan for your terrific YouTube channel!)
- I completed at least 50 push-ups and 100 sit-ups every morning
- I journaled and read before going to sleep most nights
- I read scripture every day for 21 minutes (and finally finished the Bible cover-to-cover)
- I began a weekly Sabbath practice from Saturday morning to Sunday afternoon
- I regained advanced proficiency in Spanish through my new guilty pleasure: telenovelas!
- I had 1–2 ambling conversations each day with a friend, family member, or potential date
How was I able to do this?
This great recalibration was possible only as a result of numerous privileges: some obvious, many subtle, all much more apparent to me now than before. Even within the deepest isolation period of my life, I felt inextricably interconnected with so many other people, systems, stories, and circumstances. I am profoundly grateful for the support they gave me over the past 70 days.
Safety and security
- Financial: job, salary, savings, safety net
- Physical: stable housing that is safe and affordable
- Psychological: relatively harmonious home and work environments, solid relationships
Health
- Physical: overall excellent health, able-bodied, not immunocompromised
- Mental: clear sense of purpose, dedicated past year to learning to be my own best friend
- Social: reliable good friends and family who are able and willing to be there for me
Life situation
- Family obligations: single, never married, no kids
- Age: young enough to need little assistance, mature enough to have some perspective
Access
- Services: delivery service workers, video conferencing, smartphone + email = telework
- Basic needs: nutritious food, clean water, reliable utilities/internet, native English speaker
Perspective
- Historical: 1917 Influenza, Anne Frank, MLK, Mandela, Christian contemplatives, Jesus
- Contemporary: people experiencing homelessness, people in prisons, front-line hospital workers, elderly and/or immunocompromised individuals, people living in nursing homes
Why did I feel this was necessary?
At the outset of the stay-at-home orders, I saw a few friends who work in hospitals post photos of themselves with signs that read “stay at home for us” and “I stayed at work for you, please stay at home for us.” To me, this request felt personal, tangible, and quite simple. As a longtime student of disasters — in graduate school, I studied how wars, floods, earthquakes, fires, and the like can act as a catalyst to bring people together or tear people apart, and wrote my first book on the impact of shared traumas on social capital — I wanted to do my small part in this moment of generational suffering. Staying-at-home as much as possible while working as hard as I could to help through my homeless nonprofit felt central to whatever modest sacrifices I would offer.
On March 14th, when I began my shelter-in-place, I hopped on Change.org and created one of the first grassroots campaigns in the country calling for a nationwide stay-at-home. Quickly, the campaign gained traction. Meanwhile, my work at Miracle Messages became more demanding. Initially, we helped deliver hundreds of bottles of hand sanitizer, masks, and other critical items to local homeless nonprofits and hospitals. Currently, we are working with cities and counties to pilot a virtual buddy system, which has matched scores of volunteers with people experiencing homelessness who have been moved into hotels for weekly phone calls and text messages.
Work felt busy yet meaningful, and I felt a personal sense of obligation to do my very best to serve our homeless neighbors and partner organizations whilst honoring the request that my doctor and nurse friends made of me: “stay at home because we can’t.” I did not want to be sidelined by getting sick, or risk unwittingly spreading this horrible virus to a single other person.
Given my work with an especially vulnerable population, I was worried that I might become an asymptomatic carrier of COVID-19. To be sure: before this great recalibration, I lived a rather frenetic life. As a random sample, here is a partial list of large group events I attended in the 10 weeks prior to sheltering-in-place for 10 weeks:
- a 300-person fundraiser for my nonprofit
- a 250-person meditation gathering
- a 40-person Christian retreat (three times)
- a 100-person grad school networking reception
- a 70-person grad school networking reception
- a 800-person homelessness conference at a hotel in Oakland
- a 200-person talk I gave at a university outside Sacramento
- a 150-person philanthropy conference at a hotel in Napa
- a 10-person family dinner to honor my grandpa, who was likely one of the first people in the US to die from COVID-19 (here, and see the last paragraphs of this NYT article)
- multiple visits each week to the gym (YMCA), my office (at the mall), and trips on BART
These are the large group gatherings that I can recall. This does not account for the smaller get-togethers, from dinners with friends to day trips around the Bay Area to a “think week” in Gold Country. Nor does this consider the dozens of interactions I have each week with people experiencing homelessness at shelters, meal services, near encampments, and on the streets.
In short, I did not want to be a super spreader, and took extraordinary precautions to mitigate that possibility. Still, I did not stay-at-home for 10 weeks solely for the sake of public health.
This was a very personal decision for me, as it was and continues to be for so many of us as we begin to cautiously reemerge. Simply put, my lifestyle before the pandemic was not sustainable.
A telling vignette: after my mom passed away in 2008 and I finished getting her house ready for rental, I went on a 10 week backpacking trip through Southeast Asia, to try to rebalance (and, in retrospect, grieve). It took me a good 7–8 weeks into the trip to finally relax: days were filled by a constant drumbeat of activity, zipping and zapping more than just breathing and being. Then, a day before my 24th birthday, I dislocated my shoulder for the second time in my life while playing beach volleyball on a remote island in Thailand. My scuba diving plans for the next day were scuttled. And so, on my birthday, I found myself alone, arm in sling, walking from one end of a beach to the other, back and forth, looking for someone to hang out with, something to do, seeking connection, but never once enjoying the stroll or the book in my bag. Until, that is, my third or fourth roundtrip, when I realized how lonely and sad I was. I sat down and wept and felt sorry for myself. A few minutes later, a beaming Thai vendor approached and gave me a sarong — “for good luck!” — and some traveler from the youth hostel came over and said hello. And in that moment, for the first time in my entire trip, I stopped social distracting myself from myself, started to acknowledge what I felt, sat with my feelings, and soon after, felt significantly better.
But it took me awhile.
Over 10 years has passed since that backpacking trip, and I have grown up a lot since then. But the shadow lingers of nonstop activity and service as my distraction from sitting still, being present, and taking care of myself rather than expecting others to do that for me. Realizing all of this is one thing; responding to it is another. I tend to find it easier to commit my life to others than to myself, and to empathize with how someone else feels than to express my own feelings.
Even in my faith, as deep-rooted and core to my being as it is, I tend to experience God deeply and visibly through other people, but rarely do I seek God directly for help, counsel, support, or peace, nor do I examine where in my day I felt close to God and where I felt distant from God. I get distracted, but I can get so distracted that I don’t even realize how much I am distracte
…This is why staying-at-home for 70 days felt necessary for me.
What did I learn?
This period taught me a lot. Most of the lessons came from within, less of a novel education and more of a return to something deep, stirring quietly, that I had somehow managed to forget.
- I realized how little I actually need in life to feel complete. And how vital it is for me to be aware of the little that I do need, and receive it. I found abundance in relative scarcity.
- I noticed more, including how much I already have.
- I experienced a newfound gratitude for what is, and relinquished my false sense of control over what might be.
- I learned how to validate myself, rather than rely on others to affirm who I am.
- I discovered the value of embracing each period of life for what is, for this too shall pass.
- I remembered that Jesus wept, too.
