Amid of what seemed like an onslaught of sheer chaos in a myriad of ways at the behest and caprice of March 2020 worldwide, I found preference and solace from a statement of a close friend. Being that this friend is as high strung of a person anyone will ever encounter, I gravitated to him at the beginning of the Covid19 pandemic because I knew he’d serve as a linchpin of survival as the research extraordinaire who will question, refute and validate concerns that necessitate attention. On this day he told me, “This thing isn’t going anywhere for a long time” when talking about the Corona virus which was also a softer way of saying that our collective notion of normalcy was disappearing fast with no near sight of return. Alas, America was now leveraged by a plight it usually dismisses on the news as unfortunate, yet out of the reach of its first world comfort. This dilemma blanketed the planet as prevalent as the stars put our nights to bed with a moon’s vantage point that we could finally see that we are all tied together, albeit by the strings of an indiscriminate threat.
My usual and reliable ironclad optimism had started to wane after the first couple months of the world being shaken up like an ant farm, but my response to my friend was rooted in what I store as a back up to that optimism- a resolve that prepares me to never back down from a challenge. I joke about this imaginary battery with friends of other races as one black people have learned to store in our backs through our experience in America. So, I responded with, “I don’t care if this goes on for the next twenty years, I’m going to come out of it unrecognizable.” At the time, I had started to let my hair grow out again and I was working out with religious fervor doing calisthenics and hiking since all the gyms were shut down, but the drive fueling that statement had nothing to do with any assumption of it pertaining to an outcome attached to physical appearance. I was shadowed by the same fears, insecurities and uncertainty as everyone else that assailed me in the forms of insomnia, worry and periods of helplessness. The difference was that I saw the time as an opportunity to reset many aspects of my life and ensure that they were changed for the better with a tag of longevity. Following are some of the things I made a choice to revamp in order to give myself a sporting chance in the face of any obstacle.
The first thing for me was armoring a healthy lifestyle with more discipline. I’ve always been consistent, not perfect, with maintaining a healthy lifestyle, but I placed greater emphasis on my eating habits, workout regiment and thoughts through mindfulness. I’d be lying if I said at that time, that I always ate healthy, pushed myself past the inevitable workout plateau or thought from a place of clarity on a daily then. I mimicked the occasional frequency of the fear, insecurity and uncertainty I mentioned earlier that was plaguing the globe, so I vacillated between extremes of an Instagram fitness guru and Jeff Lebowski.
I indulged the chicken wing, carne Asada and mini chocolate donut binges following strenuous hikes as balance because I rationalized that it assuaged and rewarded the noise outside of my quarantined bubble, but my thoughts always brought me back to a needed shift in trajectory overall. The inception of that shift came from a conversation with a friend of mine serving football numbers in the penitentiary on a phone call. He asked me how it was on the outs with this pandemic in which I said, “Man, dawg…it’s like prison. Everything is shut down. Social distancing, no gathering and…” He cut me off, “bruh, walk to your door and open it. You can walk in and out. Don’t ever confuse that with serving time, homie. Serve your time during this pandemic with discipline and that time will serve you.” My mindset changed from there.
Being that I was living in a house by myself with a dog as my companion, I decided to convert potential quarantine loneliness into an inordinate amount of time afforded to focus on all facets of my life with a fortunate option of working remote when I wanted through my career. I grabbed a notebook and decided to write everything down that I ate daily along with my physical activity, meditation and reading to serve as a log. I devised a “five-two” method that would ensure that I ate by the book Monday through Friday and like a javelina accosting a trash bin on the Saturdays and Sundays. I ate a sandwich bag full of fruit that usually consisted of sliced apples, pineapples, and strawberries coupled with a cup of green tea leaves with pomegranate and ginger root for breakfast. Lunch was a small portion of grilled chicken, a handful of raw spinach, grape tomatoes and a chopped carrot that usually invoked coworkers say stuff like, “man, you look like you’re feeding a tortoise” and I’d reply, “yeah, the tortoise won the race.” As a snack, I’d have a banana and a couple handfuls of raw, mixed nuts and seeds. For dinner, I’d eat oatmeal with coconut oil, honey, cinnamon, raisins and blueberries.
This eating routine was stuck to with the essence of glue for at least ten months. I can’t count how many times friends questioned that I was afraid and/or paranoid of contracting Covid because I refused time and again to join them out to eat pizza and sushi for dinner but rather, I was adhering to a commitment. Weekends welcomed my cathartic gluttony. I meditated for fifteen minutes every morning when I woke up. I did the same every night before I went to sleep. Like any effective alchemist, I started cleaning out thoughts in my mind camouflaged as worry that didn’t serve me and in turn manipulated them into intentions to manifest and serve me well.
It works. REALLY WORKS. I was reading a book a week. Then I bought a new laptop and started compiling scrolls of writing I’d written to publish my own books. A pair of hiking boots was purchased online when I found a deal then I was gifted by an accidental, extra pair when they were delivered. I was set as I then started ripping through terrain throughout the southwest and taking road trips when I wasn’t working. I started taking supplemental vitamins in my late teens, but now I was also an herbal remedy disciple with a regiment of sea moss, black seed oil, elderberry, milk thistle, sea buckthorn and soursop. I refused to watch the news at all, and I started deleting and unfollowing people on my social media by the hundreds if I determined all they posted was negative poppycock because that was the only avenue, I was using for overall world information besides my own separate research.
I seldom watch TV, but I got sucked in by Netflix, watching documentaries and movies. While everyone was watching Tiger King and The Last Dance, I kept three movies in heavy rotation that always stayed on during the day even when I wasn’t home- The Shawshank Redemption (my all-time favorite movie), The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (my second) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (the oddest love story that still fascinates me). Having these on at all times allowed to do other things without wasting time by sitting and watching. I can recite the dialogue of those movies verbatim and backwards. I did eventually sit down to watch The Last Dance and thoroughly enjoyed it as a lifetime hooper. Tiger King had my attention for about ten minutes of the first episode before my brain cells formed a committee and questioned what I was doing with my life.
Another thing I did was take to financial literacy with a voracious appetite of better understanding. I faithfully listened to podcasts along with read books on the way to developing better practices of budgeting/saving, creating multiple streams of income and familiarizing myself with the stock market- particularly in the areas of index funds and ETFs through companies like Vanguard. I realized passive income is the ultimate weapon of the wealthy and I was at the perfect juncture of my life to explore such options being single without children yet. Scrutinizing numbers in terms of finances changes everything and it made look at relationships differently with who I wanted to consider partnering with to start a family and speaking of partnership, that’s the objective- to form a partnership, not a sponsorship- in the words of Shannon Sharpe. I bought a brand-new car and kept my clunker to drive on weekends for Uber eats (an absolute gold mine when the country shut down).
Like my eating habits, this was another area that perplexed my friends because I was always unavailable on the weekends without an explanation because I kept my enterprise close to the vest (sorry Mike, the cat is out of the bag now, but I assure you they won’t outwork us). I’m not boasting, but that stream of income gave me $400 dollars extra weekly that stacked then flipped into purchasing vending machines later for another avenue of income. The laws of nature govern the animal kingdom where survival is determined largely by who you choose to surround yourself with and I started to examine my inner circle differently. Run as fast as the gazelle to escape being food for the lion or run as fast as the lion to make the gazelle its food, because the packs you run in are imperative to the outcomes. I don’t have an undefeated playbook nor am I muscling through this with a mastered sense of knowing but mastering habits do contribute to favorable outcomes.
Also, respect due and peace to those who have been afflicted firsthand by the pandemic or lost loved ones. You are not discounted, overlooked or forgotten here and I’m not exempt of the tides of devastation that have stretched out and touched everyone in some capacity. Most importantly, the pandemic became an inescapable opportunity to embrace our mortality as the horror of it became ubiquitous and for me, fear and everything attached to fear became my friend because fear understood is as essential as water for survival. I cherish my loved ones more. The value of time is heightened, and anyone who wastes their time no longer has access to mine because it’s obvious they haven’t caught the lesson of this elongated ordeal. I usually phrase “love is the panacea” as the motif of my writing but two years into a pandemic has bestowed upon me the epiphany that adaptation is the new panacea because what we have endured what we know as a pandemic is really one disguised as life. A microcosm I doubt many of us imagined we’d encounter.
On a side note and along with my homeboy mentioned earlier who is serving a bid in prison, I’d like to express my genuine appreciation to a couple unsung guides for me throughout the pandemic. Chris Duren, the sixteen-year-old little brother from the YMCA who looks up to me and would send videos of himself tirelessly working on dribbling drills outside his house in the scorching heat during the summer daily while I was feeling robbed about not being able to go to the gym to play basketball for the first time in my life. You destroyed my excuses and illustrated resilience. And Bowser, the dog who cared about nothing other than seeing me return home every day with gargantuan smile and a wildly wagging tail. You were the sensei who gave me solace while the world was crumbling like a cookie in a vice grip.
—
