Up In The Air

Well, this was unexpected.

The work world we know has come apart at the seams, and we are all unraveled, our separate threads cast to the four winds. We are up in the air. Or at least I am.

There are two elements of my own personal un-tethering.

The first un-tethering is personal, and sad. My dad broke his hip a few weeks ago. He had it repaired and went to rehab to get himself mobile again. Then COVID hit, all nursing facilities shut their doors, and he is now alone in his spiraling dementia and Parkinsons-induced paranoia. My mom cannot reach him. We cannot comfort him. There are thousands of stories like ours, of vulnerable people cut off from their only source of grounding and joy. It is necessary, and heartbreaking. There will be many more heartbreaking stories as COVID 19 takes its toll, too many of them much sadder than ours.

The second un-tethering is professional, and unnerving. However often I worked from home, or traveled, my professional home base was my office. My table with piles of paper, my jumbo sized white board, my desk with sticky notes plastered all over it. None of that information, none of that data, is lost. But somehow, I am utterly unconnected to it. Looking at my legal pad with my to-do’s (the same legal pad that sat on my desk) I feel like I am peering through fog. What does it mean? How do I get started? What is important now?

On this second Monday of COVID-imposed social distancing/teleworking/homeschooling I feel more grounded than the first. I expect next Monday I will feel even more at home in this new reality. Eventually, assuming this thing does not end any time soon, it will become the new normal. We will adjust. Land. Come to ground. We will not be up in the air.

And what is between my current state of up-in-the-air and my future state of landing? Learning. A whole lot of learning, and change, and growth.

Because in this time we will lose so much, from the sanity of people like my dad to the livelihoods of line cooks to the lives of thousands of beloved people, I am desperate to make it mean something. Victor Frankel, in his classic Man’s Search for Meaning, says that “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.” He also says that “why” isn’t given to us – we must construct it, each of us for ourselves, if we wish not to be swamped by the despair of the “how.” My own personal “how,” the life I am leading in the comfort of my home with my husband and son, my salaried job and my Amazon delivery, is lovely and far from despair. But I carry the despair of people I love, as I imagine we all do.

This brings me back to learning, change, and growth. What if we could come out of  this thing wiser, kinder, more flexible? What if, when the offices and bars and airports all open again we ourselves were different? What if we let this time change us, but did it in such a way that we change for the better?

I am not talking about being personally wiser, kinder, and more flexible (though that would be nice) but organizationally. On the other side, what do we want our work to be? How do we want to go about getting it done? As we go about changing everything we will figure it out mostly by touch and feel, taking our bearings by hand – sometimes when our hand hits the ground as we stumble. I imagine when the fog clears it will be easy to just start running, not looking back at the murk and fog we bumbled through. Let’s not do that.

This is my why: though I cannot control any of this, I can resolve to learn, to change, to grow through it. I can resolve to observe and note and test how our workplace changes, so that when the fog clears I can intentionally look back and see the path and use it to chart the way forward. That is the opposite of despair, and I welcome it.