As I See It - Thoughts on Getting Through This Difficult Time, Week 3
Traumatic times are, well, traumatic. I have been thinking about 9/11. I sometimes make a mistake on the date, generally in the direction of “it happened on 9/01/01”. Really, I looked it up as I wrote this blog, just to make sure I was thinking about the date correctly. It is like my brain, even after 19 years, refuses to make space for that day.
For a period of time, starting on that terrible day in September and continuing during that terrible week, I literally could not summon words to provide the frame for the overwhelming despair and uncertainty and confusion and, perhaps most poignantly, the challenge to my personal worldview. That did not end until I read an opinion piece by the late, great journalist William Raspberry. It was quite the aha moment, “Oh, that is what I am thinking.” Mr. Raspberry helped me re-open the gates of concrete thinking, and then I could go it alone again.
The many issues of this pandemic are also challenging my ability to frame my world. There are too many things to worry about. I do not know how to put them in order to work through them. In this case, I have the words, I just need what can be best described as bookmarks, so that I have a starting place for my thinking.
All of that being said, today I read a masterful blog, “Simple Ways That Photographers Can Help the World During the Crisis of the COVID-19 Pandemic”, written by Nicco Valenzuela for Fstoppers. After I read the blog, I realized that photographers on Instagram are helping me by providing some “bookmarks” that allow me to begin to randomly process some of these weighty issues on my mind.
On my grappling with the implications of sheltering down:
Photo by Roland Lüthi. Used with permission. “The Involuntary Quarantine.” You can see Roland’s Instagram gallery at @rwluthi.
On my need to think through religious issues:
Photo by Raul Luis. Used with permission. “Therefore, keep encouraging one another and building one another up, just as you are in fact doing.” 1 Thessalonians 5:11. You can see Raul’s Instagram galleries at @visiones_de_mi_vida_ll and
On my dilemma of the need to shop and the need to go out for walks.
Photo posted on Instagram by Jeff Snyder. Used with permission. “The Risk Taker.”