Doing more with less

Why it still feels hard

The average temperature the past four days has hovered around 89 degrees. The heat index yesterday was 101 degrees. A 20-minute dog walk, whether at 6:30 am or 8:30 pm, has left me dripping with sweat. This July is the second rainiest since records have been kept. While August wasn’t as rainy, we had several heavy downpours and some intense thunderstorms. The city called one night and left a message warning that people should only drive if essential because of predicted heavy rain. It turned out not to be so heavy that night, but considering whether or not you might get caught in a flash flood is suddenly a calculus we have to consider. The humidity has been so thick, exercising outside felt much more laborious, as if you could feel your lungs working to pull the oxygen out of the soupy, wet air. The heaviness of the air, the intensity of the summer sun, these things make being outside feel unbearable, a chore to walk let alone run or work in the garden. I feel trapped by heat, unable to move the way I want to, unable to open windows in my house and feel the fresh air.

Some days, it feels as if the weather is mirroring our collective emotional health—heavy and sad. People are having a hard time. We have settled into whatever life after COVID is going to look like. And it’s not the same as life before COVID. By 2021, most of us realized things were not going back to 2019. Too much had changed. But many of us didn’t think it would still be this hard. It feels like we are doing more with less, that it’s harder to get to a place where things feel manageable, doable.

I’ve thought a lot about why this is. Financial, political, and climate concerns intensify the day-to-day challenges. COVID drove prices up, and they never seemed to go back down. Very few of us have seen our salaries or hourly wages rise at the same pace—if at all. While we no longer have the fire hose of disaster that characterized 2016-2020, the news is still filled with threats to democracy, corruption of our political leaders, and the erosion of human rights in the central and southern US. This summer has been marked by excessive and sustained water, fire, smoke, and heat like we have not seen before. We have moved from the era of global warming to global boiling.¹ Without significant changes to how we live, our planet will soon be inhabitable. With every season, every day without serious, sustained efforts to reduce our impact, we move further from being able to stop climate change. These factors, among others, create a shared context in which we are all working to live our lives. They make things harder and the fewer resources one has, the more these factors complicate living.

Managing these increasingly challenging times requires connection. It is our relationships with each other that help us shoulder the hardships in our lives. In short, we need each other. And yet, as with other things in our lives, many of us are finding that we are short on bandwidth for each others’ struggles and finding our relationships offering less buffer and replenishment. It’s happening all around us—the person behind me at a red light honking and gesturing furiously because I am not turning right on red, despite the large sign stating clearly “NO TURN ON RED.” The last-minute cancellations of plans; the increased asks for time, money, support but in the absence of built-up good will. Being asked to do more with less.

One of the major casualties of COVID was our emotional reserves—what we draw on to both to get ourselves through difficult things and to support others when they need our help. We fill those reserves through things that bring us joy—listening to music, seeing a live performance, watching sports—and things that help us relax and relieve stress—exercise, walking in the woods, sitting by the ocean, kayaking down a river. Human interactions that provide a sense of connection, empathy, or joy are our most important source of replenishment. While we recognize the value of a long conversation with a close friend or a gathering of friends filled with laughter and connection, COVID highlighted the importance of our small, daily interactions with strangers or people known to us through a specific context—the barista who made your coffee every morning, the person working at the front desk in your building, the crossing guard in front of your children’s school. When these interactions abruptly ended, we felt their absence. In the isolation of early COVID, the absence of these microinteractions and the limited interactions with family and friends outside of our pandemic bubbles drained our reserves.

Many of those interactions didn’t come back. Work situations changed. Fewer or no days in the office meant less coffee or lunch out, less rides on public transportation, less in-person time with coworkers. People pruned their relationships during COVID; loss of shared activities meant some relationships naturally fell away while others were more intentionally let go. The initial gratitude and thrill of getting together with friends after vaccines and testing made social interactions feel less risky has given way to a frequent sense of things coming up short.

We are all still grieving. In fact, it is the return to normalcy that has allowed us to even start grieving. The losses from COVID are great. We all know people who died from COVID, people who died from other causes during COVID. For many of these deaths, COVID prevented us from participating in the usual rituals around loss—memorial or funeral services, sitting shiva, gathering with others who loved this person to share that collective grief. Even once those rituals were reinstated, there continued to be a veil of potential risk hanging over these services. Being together had become something that might make us ill.

We look at our children and feel the pain of two lost years. The learning, the emotional and social development that was significantly slowed by COVID. The possibilities of new friendships that never got to develop, the basketball games that were not played, the school performances that were never presented, the birthday parties replaced with car parades and handmade signs. The shyness that might have been overcome with a teacher’s support that instead, grew worse. The insecurity that could have changed into a sense of self worth instead deepening with the cruelness of social media. The occasional worry that became full-blown anxiety.

Our parents aged. Friends’ marriages dissolved. Friendships ended. Routines never got re-established. Jobs became more or less important. People changed. While it hasn’t been all sadness, the initial joy of re-engaging with the world muted and life resumed. But with the knowledge that our world could be turned inside out and upside down with very little warning. That we could lose so much.

Grief changes us. We use all different ways to manage it—facing it head on; denying it; trying to embrace a toxic positivity; becoming angrier, sadder, more hopeless, irritable. And sometimes, having a renewed appreciation of the preciousness and brevity of life. We all experience loss and grief in our lives. It is part of being human after all. This grief is different than anything most of us have experienced in our lifetime. It is a global experience: We all went through COVID, we all experienced tremendous loss. This has happened before, of course, but not in most of our lifetimes.

So we all need a little more buffer, a little more grace, a little more kindness. But we are asking that of people who also need the same, who also feel drained and overextended and overwhelmed. Which means we get a little less than we need, we give a little less than we might have before. That the slights hurt more, the unsolicited advice irritates more, the thoughtlessness feels more intentional. The heaviness of being human weighs on us with a dew point of 80.

So how do we pull out of this? How do we refill our emotional reserves and find kindness again? How do we push through the ground as a brilliant red bloom against a snowy March day? Choose connection with those you are closest to and grow those relationships. Be deliberate about where you put your precious energy. Ask yourself is this something I want to do? Need to do? What is it in service of? Find joy. In small and large ways. Notice the small kindness of a stranger, a neighbor, a loved one. Assume best intentions. Listen to music. Loud, if you like that. Dance. Sing. Write. Create. Walk in the woods. Hike a hill or a mountain. Alone. With a friend. Spend less time engaging over a device and more in person. Leave your phone behind or on a different floor. And let yourself feel all the feelings, not just the optimistic ones.

We have only one reality and that is the here and now. What we miss by our evasions will never return…Each day is precious: a moment can be everything.

~Karl Jaspers

I have learned to be more intentional about everything I do. To remind myself when I feel frustrated to evaluate whether it is something I need to get upset about. To slow down. To put more effort and care into the relationships I value the most. Of course, I am not achieving this every day or even every week. I find myself getting annoyed by stupid things, yelling back at the man wildly gesturing behind me to turn. But I am more patient with my kids. I try to tell the people I love how much they mean to me more often than I did in the past. I try, as I have been writing about all summer, to hold the good with the hard, to not avoid the sad. To remember that after this oppressive heat and humidity comes the autumn, when the trees show us the stunning beauty of letting go.

1. Retrieved 8/20/2023 from https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/jul/27/scientists-july-world-hottest-month-record-climate-temperatures

Photos by Dana Giuliana