I consumed this essay with interest when it recently posted through Lit Hub. In it, the author confronts the impending intersection of her life’s evolving circumstances with her elderly cat’s declining ones. She offers perspectives from the Czech writer Bohumil Hrabal’s exploration of his experiences with a stray cat colony to which he tended, and ultimately had occasion to cull, and the existential gloom that accompanied his actions. We are far from the only creatures that kill, but we are, to my limited knowledge, the only ones to do it with such variable intent: sport, necessity, desire, malice, mercy.

My cat, Towanda, is not yet 4. Or maybe is already. It’s unclear. Her early years are a mystery. She has epilepsy, or something that resembles it, for which she ingests powdered barbiturates twice daily with a pâté of seafood byproduct.

She is my second cat. Her predecessor, Rocky, was a tuxedo who epitomized all dressed up with nowhere to go. I adopted him sort of by accident (isn’t that often how it goes…) when he was only a few weeks old. He and his sister had been born to a house cat with loose morals whose offspring were cast out. I didn’t know then, but learned, that it is common for animals who are weaned too young to develop anxiety issues. These were compounded when I moved, just before he turned 2, from a shared house with 3 roommates and plenty of foot traffic otherwise, to a 9th-floor, one-bedroom apartment with an immediate view of nothing. I was working full-time, with a heavy travel schedule, and in law school part-time. He was alone a lot, and knew it.

Fairly rapidly, he evolved from not overly social but tolerant to highly antisocial, bordering on, then crossing over into, hostile. He and I shared a weirdly codependent life. I felt guilty about my inadvertent contributions to his abandonment issues, and protective of him. He was nearly feral, remarkable for a cat who never once lived out of a human-inhabited home. He liked me enough, trusted me to a point, and enjoyed my adjacent contact. Anyone else, however, smelled like trouble. I knew, when he hissed and spat and growled and swatted, that he was terrified. Unfortunately, so were the recipients of his venom.

Two years ago almost exactly, we said goodbye to Rocky. It was, ahem, a rocky departure. He had developed an illness that is often treatable, but was deemed too unmanageable given his behavioral proclivities. His medical charts were strewn with brightly colored stickers reading “Fractious” and “Will Bite.”

I was unsure about bringing a new cat into my life, but I do believe Towanda and I were meant to be. I’d gone to a fundraiser for our local Humane Society, the employer of a dear friend of mine and a do-gooding organization I appreciate. Towanda had been in shelter for a period of months, having been transferred from another local shelter. I knew she’d had kittens, and had bad teeth, but otherwise she was deemed in good health. I was told she often was selected for these public appearances because of her amiable nature.

I was still mourning Rocky, and had immediate adopter’s remorse, looking at this curious interloper. She adapted immediately to home life. Whatever had shaped the first 2-and-change years of her existence, she exhibited a ready willingness to connect. All she seemed to want was a human to call her own. Quickly, I was won over.

At the Humane Society, Towanda had been dubbed Wanda, arbitrarily so I was assured. I upgraded her to Towanda, in honor of one of my favorite literary personas. In Fried Green Tomatoes, Towanda is an alter ego more than a defined character, embodying empowerment, self-worth, and the unbreakable bonds of friendship. She is all these things. She believes the best way through is directly over, shamelessly clambering over me and houseguests to get to the other side where, we presume, something optimal awaits. She is curious and not shy about scaling me or the furniture to smell my food, in case it’s for her. She loves naps, especially in laps, and a tube-shaped fabric thing filled with catnip and adorned with the drawing of a lobster, which she uses as a horizontal scratching post and a pillow. Open windows and screened patios are her kingdom. I imagine how much more she knows than I about our proximate world based on sounds and smells imperceptible to me.

Towanda has lived with me for only a year and a half. For half of that, her health has been complicated. Because of the pandemic, I didn’t bring her to my regular vet for some months after she joined my tiny household. Last August she went in for a routine check-up and shots, and it was determined her oral health was sufficiently crummy to warrant massive dental surgery, removing, likely in phases, most of her teeth. This was all well and good, if seemingly daunting at the time. She appeared to come through the first surgery fine, but labored breathing earned her a stay at the emergency hospital for observation, and a whole lot of medication in the couple weeks to follow. Have you ever tried to give liquid medicine orally to a cat? Don’t, if you can manage avoiding it.

While, looking back, I’d swear there were neurological indicators as early as August and the surgery’s aftermath, it was in November, Friday the 13th, that she experienced grand mal seizures and the diagnosis of presumptive epilepsy. This designation and its resultant physical manifestations have earned her second and third hospitalizations, and various other trips to the vet for bloodwork and assessment.

Lately, we had hoped the illness was coming under new management. The drugs seemed to be working. Since her last hospitalization, in mid-February, she’d been tolerating a dramatically increased dose of the phenobarbital, with no observable seizure activity.

We’ve all heard some version of the saying, “Make plans; God laughs.”

I’d finally grown into some comfort with the stability of her condition, and felt audacious enough to reschedule for early summer a trip with my mother, which had been scuttled by COVID last spring. The next morning, at about 5:30am, Towanda had a seizure. I’ve learned the difference between grand mal and focal seizures, and to notice her behaviors that indicate an episode. In the last week-plus, she’s had several more of the focal variety. These have not yet escalated to what is called “cluster” status, in which they occur in rapid succession. But they are happening more frequently, which indicates her dysfunctional brain activity is firing with increasing fervor, mind-altering substances notwithstanding.

Tomorrow, unless she decompensates between now and then, she’ll go back to the vet for bloodwork. We’ll see whether the drug is still at what is considered a therapeutic level in her system. If yes, or if no, I’m not sure what’s next.

I hate being the arbiter of her fate, and assessor of her quality of life. When not actively in seizure, she seems fine. I am not someone who disdains anthropomorphizing. I believe, when you spend enough time with an animal, you come to know their personality, their inclinations, and, however you may interpret it, their souls. She doesn’t think, or feel, or communicate like me. But she does, in her own way, all of the above with clarity and conviction.

Her most recent seizure was at about 3 this morning. Then, recovered, she slept hard, stretched across the ample real estate of my torso, snoring and dreaming. I, however, didn’t sleep much.

I don’t know what decisions await me, or not, sooner, or later. She has been the best possible company during a time of such expansive destabilization. Having an animal alongside you is a useful energetic mirror, as well as source of calm and stability and routine. At present, she is asleep on the carpet across the room from me. She has given up on immediately receiving breakfast, but with any meaningful movement on my part will revive and commence commentary.

I am not, in its most reductive sense, a fatalist. During time spent not long ago with a dear friend who is attuned to our shared, somewhat warped sense of humor, we were enjoying an absurdly satirical show, Avenue 5, which I’d been assured I’d find hilarious; sure enough. In one episode, a character comments on the vagaries of “jazz fate.” It’s like fate, but with occasional atonal flourishes and riffs. That feels right. We all move, more or less, in a direction, but there are these moments of freestyle interlude.

I think there are relationships, animal and human, that have a purpose. I don’t know if Towanda’s, per se, was to help me get through the pandemic and an associated time of personal growth and redirection. I don’t know if she’ll be with me for another week, or another decade. I wish I didn’t have to decide.

There is a splash of satire in this post, relative to its inspiring subject matter. I was recently pointed to a fascinating think piece in the New York Times, Charlie Warzel’s “I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age,” about the so-attributed “internet prophet” Michael Goldhaber. Among Goldhaber’s predictions: “the complete dominance of the internet” as well as “personal websites, oversharing, personal essay, fandoms and online influencer culture — along with the near destruction of our ability to focus.”

And, so, here we are! A blog, which is just a different word, in many contexts, for a personal essay, shared on the internet, with some dose of fandom and oversharing, and a grain of hope, for purposes of my professional ego, that someone reads it and likes it. Also, not a half-hour ago, I lamented aloud to myself and the cat how much trouble I feel I’m having right now with focus.

I am no futurist, but I suspect the internet is here to stay. Maybe not forever-ever, but I don’t know how to visualize a world in which we revert entirely to an analog world. Absent, perhaps, a calamity the likes of which we haven’t yet confronted that upends status now. But, on the other hand, we’ve sort of been living those calamities for the last year (and arguably more), and if anything we’ve only doubled down on tech.

Personally, I can’t imagine giving up technology completely. I rely on it professionally and personally. I’ve gotten awfully used to typing instead of handwriting. Email and text are so convenient. Being able to look up any word or event or piece of information in a flash is handy. GPS maps are a dream.

I have to say, though, I have noticed a degradation in my own capacity to attend, in an addiction to devices and instant external feedback. I try to maintain boundaries. I may well observe the phone ring, or hear the telltale ding of an email or other incoming message, and choose not to respond immediately. Sometimes, I’m just doing something else. There are data around how long it takes to refocus following an interruption: 23 minutes is the generally agreed-upon duration. That’s a darn long time over the course of a work day in which umpteen notifications may cross my eyes or tempt my ears. Also, I’ve never embraced the notion that, just because I carry a smart phone with me most of the time, you should have the right to always, always have access to me. I certainly don’t feel that way of you.

To combat these interferences, I keep my phone on silent unless I am in wait of a critically urgent call. I turn off as many notifications on my computer as I can, and keep the volume between low and off. If I desperately need to better concentrate on a computer-centric task, I close the mail program and various social media tabs.

I, and I suspect anyone who has anything to do with social media in a professional capacity, am bothered by the intellectual and actual laziness daily betrayed by how people interact with these platforms. On the regular, my family’s restaurants get social media messages asking to see a menu. It’s really straightforward: go to the website. People, with alarming and frustrating consistency, ask for information they could, in less than the time it takes to extract such data from the crowd, and more precisely, find themselves, like where a business is located, or its hours of operation.

In Mr. Goldhaber’s viewpoint, and accurate to my own experiences and musings, attention is the commodity of the day. If people are paying attention to you, or even aware of you, you are on top of the world. As soon as that fades, so do you. And this is agnostic to the quality of the information. A failing of the internet is that it has made information so ubiquitous that it has lost some of its power. Businesses that wish to have a meaningful presence on social media are de facto mandated to pay for some sort of digital advertising. It is, otherwise, nearly impossible to reach an audience of any scale.

There are positives as it relates to the confluence of the internet and information. For one client, Future Ready Collier, I recently helped shepherd a major reorganization of their website so community-focused resources were much more easily found, an essential purpose of this collective impact network seeking to enhance a regional education ecosystem. Another client, Health in Motion Network, a healthcare start-up based in Ohio, is working hard to build a digital platform that will functionally centralize a patient’s entire healthcare experience, from records to treatment to wellbeing. To the extent information is both accessible and useful, it has real value.

Where does this all lead us? Warzel’s piece in the Times explores Goldhaber’s larger scale concerns around how the perversion of attention is particularly problematic in the context of politics and how we are simultaneously being distracted from the facts of the matter and pulled to more polarizing, sensational viewpoints. It is maybe less dangerous but no less applicable in the day-to-day context of our roles as consumers of business and services and goods. How to find what will really serve our needs, and diminish the noise?

As I pick up my phone for the 150th time in a day to see if anything illuminating has happened, which it generally has not, or some compelling message has come through, which it generally has not, I am aware of, saddened by, and yet feel somewhat powerless to remediate my inattention. Part of why I and my family love to escape to rural corners of New England is because of the opportunity to disconnect a bit. I think I trust my ability to sort through the miasma of informational BS that constantly circulates. But I’m also sure I unknowingly fall prey to some of it. I know I like some of the ads I am obliged to be served on social media, and I don’t like some of the others. I know I am frustrated by the volume of spam emails I receive. I know I am tired at the end of the day after having spent 8 to 12 hours looking at screens of varying smallness.

Warzel concludes, a point with which I concur, that the best tactic is to get better at paying attention to what we’re paying attention to. That is a practice. But a worthy one. In my calendar, I consider whether I need to block time to pay attention. I think they call that meditation? Stop, listen, breathe. Moments of quietude make the clamor less intrusive.

Note: Cross-posted from my website, c1b1communications.com.

Amid recurring rampant Hamil-fever (a welcome respite from worry over catching the more treacherously swirling Corona-fever), there are a few lyrics from the remarkable Mr. Miranda I get stuck on every time. “Death doesn’t discriminate.” Surely enough, sinner or saint, “it takes and it takes and it takes.” Moreover, “we keep living anyway; we rise and we fall and we break.” Remaining to ask, “who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”

A theme throughout the show is Hamilton’s obsession with legacy. Coming from nothing, overcoming hurricanes, pestilence, poverty, orphanhood, and lack of social station to self-establish as a Founding Father.

I can’t help but reflect on my own family’s heritage as it relates directly to Hamilton and his cohorts who won this country’s independence. However many generations ago, my paternal genealogy links to one General “Mad” Anthony Wayne. He was a Pennsylvanian so monikered for his sometimes reckless boldness. He fought in the Revolutionary War under Washington and in compatriotism with Hamilton, Lee (such as he was…), Lafayette, and the whole gang. In some of his writing, Washington commends Wayne for his contributions.

I’ve been, ages ago in terms of my own impermanence, to Wayne’s ancestral home, now a historic site nestled amid suburban subdivisions, and for a good chunk of my life lived within a reasonably neat drive thereof. All the years I was a Philadelphia resident and daily passed signs throughout the city and region marking events that happened there, history that happened there, did I feel a connection to my distant role, to the boots that walked that ground centuries before I did with a singular purpose? Do I feel like I earned my independence as an American because family members of mine were on the battlefields?

Are any feelings of pride I might have deeply complicated by Wayne’s later-in-life involvement in driving the native populations from regions of Ohio, so the white man could settle more comfortably?

Do I feel like any of this entitles me now to special dispensation?

My ancestry is almost exclusively European. My ethnicity is devoid of enhanced expressions of melanin. Based on timing, geography, and historical cultural norms, I can’t rule out the likelihood that relatives of mine owned other people in service of agricultural pursuit. I don’t have any evidence of that, though sometimes think about trying to find out for sure.

My whiteness is steeped in privilege. My family, along most of its branches, has been in this country since before it was a country, and has had a documented role in displacing native tribes (see, e.g., General Wayne’s forays in Ohio) along with British soldiers. So, I don’t know that I need to also know for sure if some of us were slaveholders, as well. It’s enough to know its high probability.

Recently we arrived at a family conversation about race relations, and a subject addressed was the value of discomfort. Any trouble we’ve experienced, trauma we’ve undergone, or hardship we’ve confronted has been draped in the ease of whiteness. To be effective allies, we need to be more accepting of being uncomfortable.

My individual legacy is unsure. Since my brother’s passing, I am the only surviving member of this generation of the family. My father’s sister died as a teenager, so I have no first cousins on that side. I haven’t had my own kids and am nearing an age, as well as an emotional acceptance, of that improbability. When my father goes, I’ll be it. When I go, it’s over. Who will tell our story? Is there even a story to be told?

Unlike Hamilton, or perhaps even Mad Anthony, I never had any designs on greatness. But I have hoped I would live a life of some smaller scale meaning. I’m not sure that’s a testament to any genetic trait as much as it is human nature. I hope I will, some years or decades hence, feel that I’m leaving my tiny corner of the world vaguely improved.

In Miranda’s Hamilton, Eliza is depicted as Hamilton’s effective counterpoint in more ways than simply as his spouse — prudent and private to his brash and attention-seeking. Eliza appreciates the importance of the narrative. I can’t shape the narrative of my ancestral legacy, but I can try to live responsibly in its shadow, and to speak honestly and honorably about the roles we all have to play in enabling the world of ideals imperfectly imagined so long ago.

This morning I got into a conversation with a friend about death. Her father-in-law is elderly and not well. There isn’t any one thing to point to that is a terminal affliction. He’s lived for a long time with unwellnesses. Even with medications and interventions and home care, now he’s thriving less and less. With continued therapy, there’s no reason to think he won’t go on surviving, but there’s a bigger question about whether he’s still even living.

As a culture and as a species, we have a death problem. With nearly all other animal species, death happens, and it happens, and it’s ordinary. There’s no acknowledgement. Animals, with minimal exception, aren’t thought of as having a presence of mind. Elephants are observed to mourn, as are orcas, and apes. Perhaps birds. Perhaps others. Perhaps they feel death among their own acutely, just lack a capacity to express their experience in a way we can anthropomorphically translate.

Or perhaps not. Old age is a modern construction. With our big brains and controlling egos, it’s only recently we learned how to keep people alive into the latter part of or even beyond a century’s worth of years.

A little under a year ago, a family friend passed away via physician assisted death in a place where that is sanctioned. He had an ALS-like illness that insistently, insidiously eroded his vitality, to the point that soon he would lose the ability to, as required, self-administer the lethal medication. Is it still medication if it’s used to end life? From the Latin origin implying healing or cure. In this instance, there was no more healing of his body, but there could be cure of his pain. Compassion, from the Latin, to suffer with.

When my brother chose to end his life, that is an action anathema to our societal norms. He was not elderly. He was not physically ill in externally discernable ways. The etymology speaks for itself. Suicide, sui generis among human behaviors. I support behavioral health intercessions. Many benefit from therapy and go on to live long and meaningful lives. There, again, for another time to consider in more depth, what roughly constitutes a meaningful life. But, at its base, alive.

A choice, but was it? He endeavored for years to feel like this world was meant for him. If there was a drug therapy, he tried it. He went through countless (actually, I think we lost count; it went on for months) ECT rounds, each time necessitating full anesthesia. He felt, he said in words, like an alien among us. The world’s pain was his. How could I ask him to endure that for decades yet just because I enjoyed his company? His presence was, to me, a balm. But I think he ran out of fight.

Now we’re contending globally with the threat of death at our doorsteps, footsteps, mindsets. And we’re doing a poor job. I don’t want to get COVID-19. I don’t want to suffer, and I don’t want to die yet, and I don’t want those fates for the people I love. I want to be careful, and try to keep the virus out of my home. Whether I’m successful in that venture is very much TBD.

I also want to keep participating in the world. There’s, admittedly and self-indulgently, not a lot of joy in my life right now. Mobility is limited. Travel is on hold. Interaction with friends is constrained. Work is digital. The long-term future of my and my family’s businesses is uncertain. I’m afraid. In the moment to moment, I’m just fine. But, in the extant existential, I’m afraid.

And, here’s the other objection, why are we so obsessed with longevity? We mythologize years like currency, which is equally arbitrary as a marker of success. Ponce de Léon never did find the fountain of youth. I’m a big Harry Potter fan but don’t aspire to compete with Nicolas Flamel for endurance. My paternal grandmother lived to be 87 and I think mostly coughed herself to death, with failing smoker’s lungs and a broken heart (and, oh, the latter connotes so much more than it says). My maternal grandmother lived with dementia for too long. She didn’t know her name, or what a name was, or barely even what language was, by the end. Is this also our strange fascination with the Greenland shark, into which lots of research dollars have been poured to determine that it probably lives 500 or more years? Undeniably, that’s an extraordinary length of time, of which it is likely entirely unaware. There are trees that live for literally thousands of years. I’d like to know their stories.

Exhortations from the Bible through to Hamilton tell us to take heed, because dying is easier than living. Maybe, as a people, we’d be less concerned with the onset of the end of life if we felt more alive while alive.

It’s an exhausting time. If you feel like you’re hanging onto sanity by a neuronal thread, you’re not alone. Our intellectual and emotional reserves are tapped, and replenishment is hard to come by. I think I see a slackening in some of the early gratitudes and self-awarenenesses that were buoying early on during the pandemic (even the pandemic has a lifespan). Appreciation for time spent at home with family gave way to the realities of trying to balance remote work with remote school. So many are out of jobs. Borders are closed. Hospitals are full. Rhetoric is running on high. We don’t know how to self-sustain. It’s hard to plant a victory garden in a condo, and there’s no fresh, potable water nearby other than what comes out of my tap. You understand why exile and isolation are used as forms of punishment.

I don’t want to live forever, and nor do I want to die young. I’m fundamentally a pretty cautious person without much taste for adrenaline, but I’d rather live a shorter life filled with people and experiences than wait around to die old but alone. I don’t know if my friend’s father-in-law will die sooner or later, or with the peace he deserves from a life well and fully lived. Whenever it happens, there will be grief among the living. It’s going to hurt like hell. Broken hearts do that. In terms of lasting impressions, death is more disruptive for the living.

The reality of existence is a little miraculous. Biologically, so much has to go right. And it’s easy for it all to go wrong. So, it’s understandable why we place a premium on life as a scientific phenomenon. I don’t know that I can advocate with a clear heart for comfort with death, per se. I know the visceral agony that comes with loss. And grief never ends. It only changes shape. Just like energy. Neither created nor destroyed. We are temporary organisms in a volatile world. I’ll try to be content to live with gravity, and perish with the stars.

Almost 5 years ago my brother died. I’ve never been so glad.

Because this would have done him in. Of all the bad things I worried would befall him during his life, getting shot with a rubber (or real) bullet or tear-gassed at a protest didn’t top the list. That’s one of the reasons I know I’m privileged. When I went to the Women’s March in Washington, DC, I wore an orange bandana tied around my arm. Its purpose was to designate me as a member of the Florida contingent. A woman on the train into DC at dark o’clock in the morning asked me if it was in case of tear gas. Clearly this was not her first go. That is another way I know I’m privileged. The reference was eye-opening for me.

Last evening there was a protest in my small city. This is a place that trends only blue in its support of law enforcement. Otherwise, red through and through. I honestly didn’t especially expect to see the national (and international) outrage bleed into our streets. Rightly call that privilege. I wasn’t there, and only saw photos and heard reports after it was well underway. Should I have gone and joined in with the marchers? Was it in privilege that I stayed home and observed it in bits and scraps through social media? Should I feel ashamed of being afraid of injury, or a distaste for being arrested? When I tell you I consider myself a pacifist, with antipathies to violence as a means to anything, that is accurate, even when I recognize the reasons why some are driven to act in anger and destruction, but is that label also a shield?

I think about how my brother would have responded. First, I think about how the years since the last presidential election would have worn him down. He was sensitive to the world’s ills like almost no one I’ve known. He was generally an exceedingly caring person, and conflict-averse. But if there was something that got his hackles up it was injustice.

The protest last night was not too far from where he lived. I can envision him walking the mile or so to join, and smoldering in the cinders of rage he would have felt. He would have raised himself up from despondency and fought, I think, if provoked.

When he died from suicide, it destabilized nearly everything I trusted about the world. So, that, I do comprehend. Still, I can point to the privileges that extended his life, allowed us to shelter him from the hardships that plague so many with similar illnesses, and enabled us to grieve him in safety.

I worry so profoundly about the collective mental wellbeing of the world. Up until a week ago, all we’d heard about in the news for most of the year was COVID-19. We should remember, while balancing current awarenesses, that the disease has not abated, and that it is disproportionately affecting minorities. Thousands are still sick, thousands more will die, and frontline workers must be running low on adrenaline. Their susceptibility to suicide and paralyzing depression is high.

Across the Gulf of Mexico from my coastal cover, a new tropical storm has been named. Hurricane season just officially began this week, and this is the third named system already. With a still-swirling pandemic, it’s an open question where people would go for shelter if a storm threatens directly. The waters are angry, too.

As with people and communities, there’s only so much heat to be withstood before a boiling point is reached.

In the last 18 hours or so, I’ve read probably fifty times Pablo Neruda’s poem, Keeping Quiet. It contains the lines, “If we were not so single-minded about keeping our lives moving, and for once could do nothing, perhaps a huge silence might interrupt this sadness of never understanding ourselves and of threatening ourselves with death.”

I won’t advocate for silence now. Silence is complicity. Silence is privilege. Today, we have to say out loud all that is wrong. But I pray there comes a time that we can sit in the silence of peace and communal empathy. When my brother acted to end his life, it was, I can speculate and do believe, to find the silence he vainly sought. It was to interrupt his own sadness and lack of understanding of self. He could no longer live in protest of his own unhappiness.

So, maybe, with my self-defined, amalgamated religion that incorporates shreds of Christianity, Buddhism, and Quakerism, I won’t be the first to take up arms. But I can take up my pen, which even today still functions as an artful proxy for the keyboard. We can talk, and we can write, and we can listen, and we can learn and share while proactively seeking respectful intersection. And there will come a moment when there will be the need to pause to breathe, and be silent even briefly, and the sadness will have been interrupted.

Scrolling through LinkedIn, Medium.com, Instagram or other related platforms, you see a lot of references to side hustles. In the golden age, at least to date, of the gig economy, wherein lots more people look to create their own living, finding reliable, viable job opportunities dwindling, the side hustle has become standard nomenclature. The promise of thousands-of-dollars-per-month side hustles, however, doesn’t totally square with reality. I’d argue, at that point, it’s just your job. Welcome to freelancing.

The various arguments in favor or against aside, the bigger and more pertinent question is about sustainability, and future evolutions of side hustling and gig working. COVID-19 has taught us many things. Among them, if you let your employees work from home, your entire organizational structure will not crumble. Productivity, in some instances, may even go up (negatively correlated with having to concurrently home-school your kids during pandemic-driven school closures).

In recent years, the business community has had more hallelujah epiphanies about how treating your team well will in turn contribute to your business doing well. Some people perform great working in an office setting. Some not as much. There’s increasing, belated acknowledgement that open-concept office floorplans are counterproductive. Regardless, life happens. Sometimes you have to tend to it, and sometimes it can only be done between 9am and 5pm, Monday through Friday.

As with most things, since this is the way my mind works, I think a lot of what needs to happen going forward is in how we frame and talk about these phenomena. Even the terms “side hustles” and “gig work” devalue these professionals’ contributions. Far from seeing it simply as a cost-savings to your company, look at it as hiring a skilled worker with beneficial talents. Even that a thing like the side hustle exists is problematic. It’s just a pretty way of saying that people, commonly in creative fields, need to get a second job to supplement their income.

A lot of freelancers came to their current vocation from previously high-level backgrounds and careers. I, for one, have a law degree that I worked my tail off for, and worked in offices with big-deal people on important tasks. If I call what I’m doing now ‘consulting’ does that make it sound more serious? If I tell you that I sometimes earn much less per hour than an experienced plumber, how does that come across? And, by the way, why did plumbers get labeled as the poster children for trades that earn surprisingly good money? A skill is a skill, and if I need a talented plumber I don’t argue with the rate; I happily pay, because goodness knows my own attempts at repair are unlikely to end well. And, when they quote me for a job, I doubt they quake as they say the number, wondering nervously if they’re asking for more than they’re worth.

I’m not opposed to shifts in how the world works. Maybe this is a slow-burning industrial revolution. But the reality is that freelance/gig workers don’t have a lot of protections or stability. To ensure that professionals flourish in these capacities, a good first step is for the companies hiring them to first state their value. The argument is a little circular because, surely, a lot of small businesses are operating on thin enough margins that allocating dollars to contract workers can feel like a leap of something more than faith. So, the value has to be mutual.

A collective shift in lingo, though, would be free. Then we can all agree there’s no need for the side hustle. It’s just hustling, period. There’s no gig work. It’s just work. With the result, ideally, better outcomes for all parties.

It’s hard to look out the window today and see the sun shine. It’s hard to sit comfortably, peacefully, and safely within the four walls of my home. It’s hard to confront at once that I will never have to feel that brand of fear, and that I am without any real power to help those who do. It’s hard not to know what to say. Now let’s forthrightly acknowledge, none of that is actually hard.

Through personal loss and introspection, I’ve come to understand why some people are inclined to do physical harm to themselves, or to people or objects around them. There are hurts so deep the only relief comes from a more tangible kind of pain. This, I think, is like that. Things are disassembling because for too long the ache has been held.

I know there’s a lot I can’t understand. I’m a woman in a man’s world, but have otherwise been afforded countless privileges. I’ve had education, and my health, and a supportive family structure. My ACE score is 1. Most of the adversities I’ve endured have been in my adult years, but albeit with a reliable interpersonal safety net. I am one of the millions of implicitly complicit. I empathize. My gut is in knots, my head swims, and tears are just on the edge. But have I acted? What am I doing to contribute to a better world in a meaningful way?

It’s been pointed out by everyone from comedians to social scientists that no person is born to hate or fear others. How we interact with the world from this perspective is largely learned, modeling after the adults who surround us when we’re young, as well as our own accumulated experiences. These early neuronal connections continue to guide our mindsets and reactions throughout life.

Overtly and observationally, I learned from my family a general attitude of tolerance and acceptance. I saw how the people who worked in the kitchens of my family’s restaurants and the fancy-dressed clientele dining in them all received the same warm smile from my dad. I saw my mom’s friendship with the woman who cleaned our house and helped to watch over me and my brother. I knew also how my mother was at times treated differently by the doctors when she went to her job as a surgical RN than when we saw the same families socially. I had the opportunity to attend a small liberal arts college grounded securely in its Quaker roots where community and respect were essential principles. I lived in a big city and witnessed at the large public health nonprofit where I worked how resilience and perseverance and the human spirit would again and again meet inequity and injustice head on. I believe that most people are trying to do their best.

But it doesn’t mean I can understand. It doesn’t mean I can know how it feels. It doesn’t mean I haven’t myself behaved poorly, splashing around in my tone-deaf, sheltered, white girl naivety.

Late last year I was increasingly speculating that the world was overdue for a good, hard reset. I’m sure the word “plague” crossed my lips. Far from making me a prophet, I would argue anyone who didn’t see the state of things steadily decompensating needs to sit up and be more aware of their surroundings.

The last few years have been overwhelmingly hard on decency. I wasn’t around in the late 60s or, of course, at any time throughout history when civilization went off its rails. But I hear from people older than I whose philosophizing feels genuine that this is the most challenging set of circumstances they’ve faced. I don’t have a personal frame of reference to compare, but this feels all wrong.

It’s easy to lay blame at the feet of the current federal administration — and, to be clear, I do think their collective behaviors and morals are reprehensible with the worst possible kind of leadership by example — but we have to also see how systemic, compounding traumas have brought us here. To a world where about 15 percent of the entire U.S. population is unemployed yet the stock market is coming off a month of gains even amid a pandemic and the richest among us have gotten even richer. To a world where the people sworn to protect public interests show a marked disinterest verging on or colliding with self-interest. To a world where trust and courtesy have been downgraded and money is our societal love language. To a world where, for so many, to sit idly in one’s own home is perceived as a threat. To a world where disease is hoax and death is political token and face masks are unconstitutional.

If I feel paralyzed, it won’t ever be because I’m face-down on the pavement with a knee to my neck. That’s the nature of my privilege, and should be the call to action. I write a lot about my fundamental belief in words. Even if this is my only power, it’s something. We all can be more vocal about what we can do better, and what we should do better. Starting with speaking up and listening in.

Will it make a difference? I don’t know. I went to the Women’s March in Washington and will always remember the sensation of standing on the Mall looking towards the Capitol in one direction and the Monument in the other and amid a million or so others. It was a nice symbol, and a nice moment, but did it lead us anywhere? I think about the extent to which the tenets on which this country was founded have been subverted. I’ve always had a hard time following the strict constructionist legal viewpoint that the Constitution should be interpreted to the letter. I feel the same way about the Bible. Call me unpatriotic, and call me heretic, but I don’t see how this is living up to our ideals as the land of the free, and I don’t think Jesus would be on board with a lot of our current deeds and policies.

It hurts. I’m struggling to focus on tasks at hand. Work feels sort of trivial. We are emotionally running back-to-back marathons at sprint speed. Nothing feels steady or sure. Nor, maybe, should it. Complacency is its own affliction. There’s a reason recovery starts with admitting you have a problem.

What I see is this: The streets are burning because it’s the people who are on fire.

I wish I knew better what to do except in this flash of history to state my solidarity. I don’t know your experience. But I see your reaction. And I feel the pain that led you there.

I understand now why people have been baking bread like mad during the pandemic. I’ve never baked bread before, other than boxed quick mixes, which hardly seem like the real thing. Is this sacrilege? I am the daughter of a restaurateur whose first love is baking. Yet I’ve never known the experience of diving fingers first, wrist-deep into a bowl of flour and water and salt and life.

A little shy of a week ago friends gifted me a portion of their sourdough starter. It came home with me in a gallon-sized mason jar, bubbling away. It smells like beer. The texture is akin to the papier-mâché sludge we used to make terrible crafts in elementary schools that our parents would hoard as treasures. As it’s alive, I debated naming it. I told the cat she now had a roommate, and competition for attention.

I was counseled that if I didn’t plan to use it within a week or so to put it in the fridge, so the clock began. Would I successfully get to it during the week, or relegate it to cold dormancy, which felt like a sort of failure? Reading the recipe, a simple, one-page how-to from Paul Hollywood’s book, there was a lot of inactive time involved. After the initial knead, a 5-hour proof, followed by portioning and another 10–13 hours resting and rising.

The first lesson from the bread: Patience and time management. It would necessarily span two days. The question was just which two, and exactly when and how.

I decided that Sunday, Mother’s Day, would be my day to start it, with Monday morning the time to bake. This would be harder if I had to go to an office or otherwise tend to pressing life. So, the vagaries of pandemic scheduling make this more feasible.

First I weighed out my flour. Then my salt. It turns out I did not have a good internal reference for how much 750 grams of flour would be, and then 500 grams of the starter slurry. As it happens, quite a bit. Which makes sense, logistically, considering the recipe indicates it makes two loaves. But I had to see it with my own eyes.

Lesson number two: There is a reality to living something, rather than just conjecture and guestimates. I had to feel the weight.

It also happened that I inadvertently used up nearly all the starter. Another measuring error. Or, perhaps, less an error than ignorance. Now I know roughly what 500 grams of starter looks like, and I will tend to the remaining starter better, feeding it and letting it grow more amply before raiding its reserves.

Lesson number three: You can’t force life to happen. You have to tend it, taking what it will give, but no more.

When I added the water to the flour, salt, and starter mix, and sunk in my hand, my first reaction was to the texture. It was smooth, but quickly became sticky and harder to work through. I dug in, scraping at the flour on the bottom and sides of the bowl, entreating it to combine with the quickly dissipating moisture in the bowl. Ultimately, I added another 50 grams or so of water, and that made all the difference. All of a sudden, I had dough.

Lesson number four: Adaptation. Sometimes you have to admit when something isn’t working.

Moving onto the kneading phase, the real work began. It was an effort to twist and push the dough, to coax the glutens into binding, stretching, and developing their internal fortitude. If it stuck to the counter, I added a bit more olive oil. For several minutes, which felt longer, I worked with the dough. I tried to let it tell me what it needed, even though its language isn’t one in which I’m fluent. I started to sweat from the exertion.

Lessons number 5 and 6: Kneading as emotional catharsis. I could channel two months of frustration, anxiety, fear, and anger into each motion. The repetition was meditative. And, the work itself was hard. But the only choice was to go with it, and understand that the work was towards a better end.

After the first 5-hour rise, I nearly gave up. It hardly seemed to grow at all. The recipe had indicated it should double in size — or even more. I was, as it were, deflated. All my kneading and coaxing, for nothing? But tossing it in the bin seemed imprudent, and defeatist. I’d come this far, the very least I could do was passively let it sit another 10 to 13 hours and see what happened.

Lesson number 7: Things don’t always work as promised, but there’s also no real value or point in conceding defeat before all proper attempts are made. You might as well persevere. Growth can happen even unexpectedly.

Sure enough, overnight the two loaves did rise. More than a little thrilling as a tentative outcome. I lifted the edge of the proofing bag to poke at one. It didn’t exactly spring back under my touch, as Mr. Hollywood advised it should. But taking heart that at least they’d risen in size appropriately what could be next other than to bake.

I lined a tray with parchment, and rolled the ball as delicately as I could from the bowl to the baking sheet. I noticed that it didn’t hold its shape, rather flattening somewhat. My hunch was that wasn’t altogether right, but, again, forward we go.

Midway or so during its baking time, I could smell what was distinctly bread. Bits of yeast and flour. I could picture the crust hardening and setting, taking on a toasted hue. I hoped that aroma portended something edible.

Bringing the first loaf out of the oven, I noticed some change of color on top, more so on the bottom. Maybe it could be a little browner, but I think it’s okay? I rapped at it. Bread is supposed to sound and feel hollow when you knock at its bottom. That means the gluten has created the desirable air pockets inside the loaf’s structure. My impression was it was going to be on the denser side.

I waited as long as I could muster to let the first loaf cool before I had to slice in and see for myself. As expected, a touch dense in the crumb structure, but discernibly bread. I ate the whole end piece without butter or any accompaniment, musing on the slight sourness, and the crust’s crisp snap. Not too bad for a first go, I think.

Lesson number 8: I will try again. I will not run out of angst to knead through. My starter is bubbling in its jar on the counter, and I will feed it again in another day or so. I think I might name the sludge Sister. The pandemic has tried us all. It will continue to. We have all had to confront in one way or another our capacities to self-sustain. An imperfectly homemade loaf of sourdough feels like just the right illustration of our collective will to survive. Now I understand.

I am an accidental entrepreneur. My career path has been a bit disjointed. The overall trajectory has been up and forward, but not within the same job description or even sector. I did not have a years’ long dream of owning my own company. There was no business plan I carefully honed and nurtured. I am where I am because of life’s unexpected turns. In this, I’m sure I’m not alone.

There’s a dichotomy in the working world I struggle with. On one hand, throughout my education and most of my professional life to date, I followed the path laid out for me, and endeavored to meet external expectations. It was about working hard, achieving, moving up, earning more. The ambition of upward mobility. On the other hand, I’ve chafed against the constraints of a traditional office setting, and always felt deeply that life is and should be about more than the financial and practical necessities of needing to work for a living.

Reality has a strong tempering effect. Upward mobility is, indeed, a nice ambition. It’s frequently not attainable. Saying someone should follow their passions and do what they love for a living is only marginally viable as advice.

Our jobs economy is shifting ever more towards gig workers, contract employees, side hustlers, and freelancers. In some ways, this could be construed as a positive development. On the employer side, it’s undoubtedly less of a financial commitment, saving on healthcare and benefits for salaried employees. For the workers, it enables a lifestyle imbued with more flexibility and diversity, counterbalanced by a weighty assumption of risk. The COVID-19 calamity has given us all a more nuanced perspective on the ins and outs of remote work and digital communications.

A hashtag in prevalent current use by the restaurant industry, so I’ve seen, and likely others, is #TooSmallToFail. Its implication is clear. A throwback to the previous financial crisis and references to the banks as being too big to let fail. Now, of course, it’s small businesses on the chopping block. In this instance, global disaster has not been wrought by systemic financial mismanagement but by the confluence of a naturally occurring, if historically devastating, disease outbreak, and varying magnitudes of social, cultural and political hubris.

I don’t know what will happen to the small businesses. My family has owned restaurants in our little city for almost 50 years, withstanding hurricanes, recessions, skyrocketing food and labor costs, and the vagaries of the dining public. Will this do us in? If, as some say, restrictions are necessarily in place for another 6 months, or a year, or 2 years, I suppose I have to assume yes, we’re done. No small business could withstand such a scenario. So, do we then witness the total collapse of our small business culture, which has been the backbone of (pardon the vague political illusions) what makes America actually great?

What will happen to my little business? The infrastructure of which consists entirely of me, my laptop, a phone, and an internet connection. I worry that budget decreases and staffing cuts will make it altogether even harder to find mutually beneficial client relationships.

On the plus side, I believe in the fundamental importance of the written word. Now is a time to tell your story unabashedly. It’s a matter of survival. Tell your customers why they’re important to you. Share anecdotes about what those relationships have meant over the life of your business. Be unequivocal about your local (or broader, if that’s your scope) impact. Dig in, hang on, and speak up, because it matters. What matters less is how we all got to where we are. The extraordinary thing is the will to keep going.

Maybe it’s a case of like attracting like, but a lot of my friends and close acquaintances are also in some kind of creative and/or self-employed vocation, so working from home isn’t an unknown quantity. But, current circumstances being wildly what they are, it’s also a case of something being very much the same, but different. In some respects, my days aren’t altogether distinguishable from pre-pandemic. My dining table and sofa are still my primary work spaces. I still juggle various clients and think about the best ways to optimize need. Through it all, however, is a noticeable tinge.

I’m among the fortunate ones to still have some work. I’m not at full capacity, but that’s probably ok. Even as a person who has always managed their time and workflow well, and loves the accountability of deadlines, this is a challenge. There are days when my brain doesn’t seem to dial in as well. My thinking is foggy, and my focus flits from task to task. One of the realities of self-employment and solopreneurship is that you’re never really off the clock. I’ve worked longer and stranger hours in the last several years than I ever did when I was in a traditional office job. There’s no idle chitchat in the break room. Vacation is a fluid concept. My time is too literally tied to my income to be frittered. Now, though, I find I need to offer myself a greater grace, and embrace the shifting meanings of what can qualify as productive time.

I consider working from home to be an asset. I suspect many professionals who pursue similar paths appreciate, as I do, the greater control over personal mobility. Because, for all the intensely long days I clock, I am equally free to set my schedule, to travel and bring work with me without filling out a time sheet, and to manage personal errands when I need to as opposed to when an employer dictates is permitted.

A potential upside to this crisis is that mindsets are shifting, by dint of necessity, about how work can be successfully executed. Whatever questions remain (big ones) about how well our society takes care of its workforce, maybe we can collectively move in the direction of more proactively embracing quality of life over, at all costs, productivity.

I like working. I enjoy learning, and am most deeply engaged and motivated when I feel like my work has real connection and meaning at its core. I get great satisfaction from a busy day, filled with meetings and brainstorms and ideas and words.

On the other hand, I also really like living my life. Scandalous as it may be, I don’t believe technology entitles the world to immediate, 24/7 access to me. I want to work and be busy and productive and fulfilled, and feel those same objectives are just as applicable in my personal life. Working from home right now is not the easiest. As much as our days have, in many ways, slowed, we need to acknowledge the percent of our daily thinking that is currently consumed, consciously or otherwise, by worry. Stress, trauma, and grief take a toll on our mental faculties. Now is arguably not the best time to expect peak performance from anyone.

I’m glad and fortunate to be able to work from home, but I’m also trying to be mindful that for all that’s the same, so very much feels different. I don’t know where my business will be in a few months, as economic realities evolve. I hope businesses and organizations will find that now is actually a strategically good time to assess their communications, but I’m respectful that budgets are an open question for many.

For now, I’ll continue working, endeavoring to produce the quality that my clients trust and pay me for. And I’ll also try to be better about refraining from self-criticism on days when maybe I needed to go for a walk or a bike ride to clear my mind, and left those lingering emails and to-dos to tend to later. I will absolutely set calendar reminders for weekly Zoom calls with friends and virtual happy hours. I will let it be ok when I’m not as ok. The work will be there. The time to focus on living is now.