My Wishes for Your Quarantine

First, I wish you health. I wish you clear breath after clear breath. I wish the same for all the people you love.

Second, I wish you the means to support your life. I wish you a home where you can feel safe, food on your table and your shelves, the building blocks of your day-to-day to be affordable, achievable, not stolen from your reach.

Third, I wish you the strength and the focus to compartmentalize fear, anxiety, and frustration—not to never feel them but to put them in a designated box, and beside them, another box for curiosity, perspective, and hope. I wish you the space within yourself for all of these emotions.

Next, I wish you time. I wish you moments in your day when you feel free, even if you also feel trapped indoors, when you feel a sense of vast inner space even if the physical space around you is tightly hemmed. I wish you the gift of moments that are all your own, to do with what you will—perhaps in a way you haven’t been able to in a long time.

I wish you good, long walks in a beautiful place, or good, long walks any place that moves you.

I wish you love and connection, whether through a screen, nestled in an earbud, or from 6 feet away. I wish that the people and creatures in your life will express that love to you and that we will all express love for our fellow Earth-dwellers by making one another’s paths a little smoother.

I also wish you a reconnection to what matters most to you. I wish you a great distilling that allows the chaff to fall away and leaves what you prize most: your dearly held values, the people and things and pursuits you hold closest in your life.

I wish you flow—the great pleasure of losing yourself in process, whether that process is writing, making art, exercising, cooking, repairing a machine, or whatever deeply engrosses you. I wish you moments when you lose yourself and everything around you in the absorption of your task.

I wish you creativity, the kind that germinates when the trappings of life fall away.

I wish that this time, this very strange and unexpected time of quarantine, of making your home a fortress and eschewing company, will be more gift than burden. I wish it offers you what you didn’t know you needed, or what you’ve needed for a long time but couldn’t ask for. I wish that closing the door on so many aspects of the lives we lived before allows us all to open something in ourselves—to plumb our hidden depths, to read the secret and inscrutable writing on our own hearts, to hear music that we’re usually talking too loud to detect. To be the people we could be if we would only allow ourselves the chance to hold still and allow ourselves to be enough.

I wish that in this self-imposed imprisonment we undertake to protect one another, we find a freedom that surprises us, delights us, and changes us for the good.

I wish you brightness today, brightness tomorrow, brightness in the darkest days ahead, and brightness beyond.