If there is one benefit to this coronavirus isolation, it’s in offering the luxury of time.  But when, like me, you live alone, the days are sometimes long, especially on dark, rainy, soggy, sad days like today— which gives me time to watch what I’m thinking about.

Here’s what I’ve found:   90% of what’s in my mind is none of my business. It involves things I can’t do anything about:  gossip, daydreams, politics, ecology, past disasters or future ones to fear. But the other 10% is my business, and this is where it’s interesting. I wouldn’t talk to a dog the way I talk to myself. When I meet a dog, I burst into happy smiles:  “Oh, look at YOU,” I say, bending down to stroke his ears and face.  “Aren’t you beautiful!”

I never talk like that to myself. I say, “What nonsense!” and, “Well, that was stupid.”

I read recently about a little girl, maybe four years old, perched fearfully on the top of  the BIG sliding board. Finally she took the dare and SLID. As she hit the bottom, she raised her fist in the air and shouted, “YAH, ME!”

I never do that.  I never say, “Yah, Me!”  I say, “Ok, you’ve done the dishes. Now for the laundry. ”

Yesterday I decided to say, “Yah Me!” all day long.  When I did a load of laundry, I fist-pumped as I moved the wet clothes to the dryer — “Yah, me!” And when I took a walk, “Yah, ME!”  When I painted the back steps,  “Yah, ME.” And when I cleaned the brushes and put away the paint without having spilled paint anywhere, “Yah, ME!” I cried, and really meant it.  By nightfall I felt unutterably happy!

I remember reading that the Dalai Lama, when young, asked an American psychotherapist, “I’ve heard there are people in  the United States who don’t like themselves.  Is that true?”

When assured it was, he murmured in bafflement, “But who would you like, if you didn’t like yourself?”

Mostly I like myself. So why do I scold and reprove? Why do I move from one job to the next, scratching off items on my daily list as if  I’m in a race, as if it matters whether the task is finished on that single afternoon. It’s not just the Inner Judge, pointing his Finger of Fault that I’m talking about.  It’s my habit of not wreathing myself in praise.  Are we taught at some early age that self-approval leads to Vanity or Pride?  Or Selfishness?

When I consider that probably most of my thoughts are ndulging in resentments or criticism‑‑ of others, or government, or friends, or total strangers, and another ten percent is probably spent considering the future or regretting about the past, (“How COULD I have said that?!”), there’s little time left over for simply being:  for glancing up, captivated by the beauty of a tree.  Or bird.  Or child.   And still less time for  the hugs and kisses that we’re all deprived of these days, while living in coronavirus sequestration. It’s true, I’m sometimes scared. I’m touch-deprived. But so what?  (“Yah, ME! I’m human.” It’s healthy to want touch and social contact: Yah, ME.)

Observing my own mind in a kind of Buddhist meditation, I think my fears and resentment, anger, irritation, worries and sense of inadequacy are actually displaced grief. I’m grieving, and I don’t even notice it. I don’t acknowledge it.

I think we are all in a state of grief, a kind of global as well as individual sorrow that we don’t know what to do with.  We cope.  We berate ourselves for not doing better. Sometimes we even weep, which is appropriate when our hearts are breaking with planetary pain.

But there’s more.  In our country, we aren’t taught what to do with grief.  We’re embarrassed by it. We dismiss it. “Get over it,” we are told.  “It’s been two months, get a grip.”  In earlier times, grief, the state of desolation at the loss of a child or husband or mother or dream or house or situation, meant the person went into mourning. She wore black for a year perhaps— or a lifetime.  If she was lucky, she was put to bed and fed chicken soup in a darkened room. It was expected that she would be fuzzy-minded, not fully present.  She was ill.

Today, as I watch the slow movement of my thoughts and emotions, I realize how traumatized I am by the daily barrage of bad news, how affected by the stress. How much I grieve. Perhaps I am blessed with shelter, food, water, heat, with family and friends, while others are hungry, frightened, homeless, ill and lost. Even so, I’m traumatized.

Like everyone.

It’s not easy what we’re doing.

Watching the slow churning of my thoughts, I remind myself to speak with gentleness, and please, with encouragement and praise.

“Yah me!” I tell myself.

“Yah, you!”