Life in the midst of a pandemic: Just do today
Here in the UK, we’ve just begun our third week of the coronavirus lockdown. A week before that, our PM, Boris Johnson, who himself is now in intensive care with the virus, announced the social distancing measures, urging people to “stop all non-essential contact with others and to stop all unnecessary travel.”
It’s been the most surreal time, and I haven’t been writing about it. There’s already so much out there, and I don’t want to bombard and overwhelm people. But still: this is my website, and I want to have my own record of this time to look back on in years to come. I don’t know that I’ll be able to capture much about this strange time, but I do want to make note of something I’ve been thinking recently. A tool and a thought that have helped me in the last few days. It’s from the rooms of 12 step fellowships (rooms which, for the first time in history, have all gone online).
The idea is simple: just do today.
I used to be in a number of twelve step fellowships. I hit rock bottom when I was 18 and suddenly had to conceive of the rest of my life without drinking, eating sugar and a host of other behaviours. It was overwhelming and self-sabotage inducing to try to do that. The people in the rooms and the literature written by the people in the rooms reminded me over and over: just do today. You don’t have to do it all. Just get through this one day.
In the fellowships, you collect coins or key rings for reaching certain milestones. There is the white one (for your first day sober – white presumably representing the flag of surrender), then subsequent key rings (in Narcotics Anonymous) are awarded at 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, 6 months, one year, 18 months, then after multiple years of recovery.
In the very beginning, 30 days felt impossible. The first time I got a string of sober days under my belt, I was completely gobsmacked. Then, around day 25, with the next milestone almost within reach, I relapsed. It was the birthday of a girl I’d gone to school with, someone I’d had lifelong jealousy towards because she was best friends with my best friend, rendering me in permanent second place, which is pretty much how I felt in my family, too.
I was back at day one. The following evening, somewhere in Surrey, I stared at the box-fresh white trainers of a guy I’d later become friends with while he told his story. At the end of the meeting, I stood up again, for probably the eighth time in total, feeling defeated and weary, and collected another white key ring.
A few days later, I ruminated on the fact that I had missed out on collecting my thirty day key ring, but by this point I was on day four or five again, and the only thing to do was to keep going.
Just do today, the recovering addicts around me said, over and over. Their wisdom was infuriatingly simple yet powerfully effective. Don’t worry about the future. Don’t try to figure out your whole life at once. Just do today.
I am holding that simple piece of three-word wisdom close right now. I need it. Because when I start imagining that we will still be in lockdown in a month or two or three or four, it very quickly becomes overwhelming. I start panicking about my career and income and how much I miss hugging my friends and seeing my family and just being free to go into shops and cafes and so on, and feel a rush of panic rise in my body and crowd out my breath. I can’t do it it’s too much how the hell are we going to get through this? The words tumble through my mind in an unpunctuated rush.
But today? I know in my bones that I can do today – even though I did wake up today at 5am, making the day a lot longer than most others! It’s 7:30am right now and already I have done two paintings, thrown the I Ching twice (the readings were positive!), have bashed out 750 words ‘Morning Pages’ style, and have now written this. Soon I might read or do yoga, and then shower and start my work day. Later, I’ll see my boyfriend’s daughter. Yes, it’s another day in lock down, and yes, the world feels strange, uncertain and weird right now, but I know that I can get through today.
As it says in one of the pieces of AA literature, "I can do something for 24 hours that would overwhelm me if I had to keep it up for a lifetime." I’m holding onto that thought. It grounds and centres me. It brings me back here-and-now.
The truth is that nobody knows how long this thing is going to last. But here we are. It’s Tuesday 7th April 2020, and here we are.