Six Ways to Grow (or not) Through This Pandemic

“Extreme event impacts.”

That’s the scientific way to describe environmental changes that influence how trees grow.

Each year, a tree forms new cells, all arranged in tight, concentric circles we call annual growth rings. Living in the Bay Area, I’ve had the chance to explore the hauntingly beautiful and majestic redwood trees of Muir Woods. I am in awe of those incredible trees and have found myself rapt by the dizzyingly perfect rings of the displayed cross-section of one that fell after it lived for more than 1,000 years. But anomalies in growth rings occur when a tree endures extreme biotic or environmental stressors. In some cases, the rings are missing completely.

I’m convinced that 2020 has been a series of extreme event impacts and I wonder about how it will affect our personal growth rings. What has this year done to us? What will it do as we move into the fall? What will it grow, shrink and erase altogether? I am particularly concerned about what it will do to our children. But I am also inspired by tiny humans and their resilience as I think of six ways to make sense of where we are and where we go from here.

Grace is resistance training for empathy.

Give and receive grace

Some 30 million Americans are jobless and there is no national plan in place to support them through this in the short-term or to turn things around. That isn’t even taking into consideration people who have lost loved ones, those who have survived infection and experienced a decline in their health or those of us who struggle with mental and emotional challenges as we attempt to process this year. It is unkind and unreasonable to others and to yourself to expect the same outcomes, SOPs, best practices and what you once defined as “normal”. Life before March 2020 is a distant memory for the vast majority of us and it isn’t going back to that. Ever. Why pretend otherwise? Grace is resistance training for empathy. When you extend and request grace, you take care of yourself and others as you create space for psychological safety.

Reset and hold boundaries

At first blush, this might seem contradictory to what I said above about grace. I assure you it’s not. Extending grace does not mean overextending or exploiting yourself or anyone else. Which reminds me: My grandmother told me to never accept wooden nickels. She would tell you the same thing.

Think beyond crumbs

Speaking of wooden nickels, indulge me while I share a quick fable: There was a baker who used a wind-powered mill to make flour for bread. One day, the wind disappeared. The birds heard about this and reasoned, “If there is no wind, there will be no flour. And if there is no flour, there will be no bread. And if there is no bread, there will be no crumbs for us to eat.” The birds decided to work together to beat their wings as hard and as long as they could until they created enough wind for the flour mill to operate. “Yay!” they exclaimed. “Now there will be flour and then the baker can make bread and then we will have crumbs!” All of that brilliance and effort for next to nothing. Why settle for less than you deserve when you can be intentional and cultivate more? Get your bread. (Especially you, women of color.)

Redefine (and capture) joy

Are you? Can you? Will you? I hope you are able to. One way I plan to do this is to take more pictures and record more videos. I haven’t taken many pictures of my daughter in the last few months. I think it’s because I see her more now than I have since before she started preschool four years ago. But she grows and changes daily. And in a way, I’m missing it, especially as I stare at screens all day for work. Today she interrupted one of my meetings to tell me that she was having some issues in the bathroom, but I shouldn’t worry because it wasn’t “constitution”. I wanted to freeze that moment in time. I should have at least taken a picture. Tomorrow (and the days after that) I will.

Focus on what matters

If 2020 has done nothing, it has laid us all bare and stripped us of distractions. In a way, the physical distance this pandemic requires may have closed some of the emotional distance humans have engineered over the last few centuries created under the guise of minding our own business (read: ignoring lived experiences of people in our companies and our communities, “othering” them into adverse employee experiences, pay grades, zip codes, school districts and generally absolving ourselves of giving a damn about equity). But you are my business and I am yours. As we pull together, we create stronger personal and professional networks that provide better support for everyone.

Skip a “ring”

The idea that you have to do anything beyond just survive a pandemic is preposterous. You are living through one of the most difficult times in our history. Have you showered and brushed your teeth since March? Awesome. If you can push yourself to start that business, finish that screenplay, get more fit, solve world peace or simply devise a recipe for the world’s most incredible banana bread, do it. But you don’t have to grow this year. We have to survive before we can thrive. Don’t you dare make yourself (or anybody else) feel bad for coping in the way that is the most healthy option possible right now.

We’ve all been impacted by the outright devastation of this virus. The impact of this blight can’t be overestimated. I’m not sure we will ever be able to truly even measure it. We have all been changed and we can’t unsee or undo the damage. But we can do our best to cope with this collective trauma in ways that help rather than hurt. While our personal growth rings will likely look a little off — or be absent — when we take a cross-section of our lives, we can choose to be ok with that.

My hope and constant, quiet prayer is that we don’t lose sight of each other and miss out on the changes within our collective forest because of all the trees.