Two Counterintuitive Practices to Save You in the Post COVID Age

In December of last year, I took a long walk with my two dogs, despite a light dusting of snow outside.

The air was crisp and the sky overcast. A few quail, with their silly topknot plumes, chirped and clucked as they ran for low foliage cover. My dogs spied them but were distracted by something in the distance.

The fur on my smaller dog’s shoulders began to stand up, and he let out a low growl. I squinted down the street and spotted movement between a patchwork of shrubs.

Two coyotes stood motionless, eyeing my dogs and me warily. There were no cars or people nearby. Just my dogs, a cool breeze, the stoic coyotes, and a quiet stillness in my soul.

The oxygen of the soul

Life wasn’t always like this. A mere few years ago, I was a busy police chief immersed in the politics and stress of running a police department.

Me, buried in budgets, politics, hiring, firing, and administrative duties. Photo: Scotts Valley Police Department

The pace of life was faster back then. Fulfilling, but hectic and relentless. There were endless meetings, appointments, obligations, and events to attend.

Me at the annual police department troop inspection. Photo: Scotts Valley Police Department

At the end of 2016, I opted to retire early and settle into a new life of writing, artwork, and photography. I enjoyed my law enforcement career and the wonderful community I served, but I was tired.

After retirement, my family and I relocated and we began a new chapter in our lives. Where before my life was a blur of people, events, and over-socialization, now I was mostly at home in my art studio. And enjoying more quality time with family.

Freedom is the oxygen of the soul. — Moshe Dayan

In the past, my public role as a police chief meant I was well known and recognized around town. Now (living in a new city) I had complete anonymity, and I loved it.

Me in my art studio.

Suddenly I could stroll through grocery stores unrecognized. I could read in coffee shops undisturbed. I traded my small-town, police chief celebrity for invisibility in a much larger town. It was freeing.

A retired law enforcement buddy, who also relocated to the same area, introduced me to a small group of men who met regularly for coffee. In short, my life slowed down and became the perfect blend of anonymity, measured socialization, and creative solitude.

Then the COVID-19 pandemic struck.

Solitude is an achievement

Everyone’s lives came to a grinding halt. As restaurants closed and public entertainment disappeared, many of my friends complained about the isolation of sheltering at home.

The weekly coffee meetings I used to enjoy became Zoom meetings. Travel plans were canceled. There was a tragic uptick of suicides in our community.

The part I’m embarrassed to admit is that through it all, I was just fine. Completely content. I rather enjoy being at home with family, reading books, writing, creating art, exercising, and contemplating life.

In my art studio in 2020 with my cat, “Skye.”

The year 2020 deepened my already monastic tendencies. Maybe it was compensation after the over-socialized years of being a police chief. After all, the introvert in me found social engagements and giving speeches exhausting.

One of the things this past year of pandemic hibernation taught me was the power of solitude. Being alone with yourself, but not being lonely. Embracing a degree of inconspicuousness in life.

Being solitary is being alone well: being alone luxuriously immersed in doings of your own choice, aware of the fullness of your won presence rather than of the absence of others. Because solitude is an achievement. — Alice Koller

Now that effective vaccines are opening up society, many people are diving back into their pre-COVID lives with a vengeance. You can’t blame them. But people are also reevaluating how they want to live in a post-COVID world.

The death of loved ones, seeing friends get sick, and invaluable time at home with family led many to contemplate the trajectory of their lives. Not to mention their mortality.

Cartoon by John P. Weiss

Going forward, as we dive back into our careers and the hustle and bustle of daily living, there are two counterintuitive practices to save you in the post-COVID age:

Solitude and patience

Practicing solitude and patience in my daily life has lowered my stress, calmed my spirit, improved my creativity, and made me more empathetic.

Solitude and patience may feel counterintuitive in our fast-paced culture of competition, consumerism, money chasing, and digital transparency. In a society where visibility equals identity, everyone is posting selfies and documenting their busy lives.

Who has time for solitude and patience?

Brothers in solitude

As we slowly integrate ourselves back into the fast-paced rhythms of work and society, we shouldn’t throw away the positive aspects of our pandemic isolation.

We should make time in our schedules for solitude and patience. Even micro-breaks in your day, to sit quietly in your car or take a brief stroll outside, can benefit your health and well-being.

Cartoon by John P. Weiss

Healthy solitude and isolation invite contemplation and observation, which help us see the world and people more clearly. We listen and observe more. We stop thinking about ourselves so much. And as a result, we become more patient with people and life’s little frustrations.

Only in solitude do we find ourselves; and in finding ourselves, we find in ourselves all our brothers in solitude. — Miguel de Unamuno

I have found this to be especially true when outdoors and in nature. Walking alone or with my dogs, my mind slows down, and I become more at one with the environment.

On my nature walks, I have rescued baby birds who fell out of their nests. I have sat on cool grass with my dogs, listening to the music of the breeze slipping through tree foliage.

As noted above, I have encountered majestic coyotes foraging through the shrubs and landscape. Their beauty and elegance help me forget about my troubles and day-to-day worries.

Walking back home, stunning sunsets have smoldered on the horizon, until all that was left was a cool blue haze and a peaceful calm in my spirit. Such moments relax my mind and body. I feel peaceful and restored.

Sanctuary the size of a minute

Healthy solitude and isolation are not necessarily about withdrawing from people and society. The author Akiko Busch, in her essay, “Notes On Minor Solitude: Even a Few Moments Alone Can Be Sustaining,” writes:

And it occurs to me that this may be a good moment to be reminded how solitude can be woven deeply and intrinsically into our social selves. And how our public and private lives are inevitably connected. Social media, digital communication, and the connectivity of the virtual world mandate that we be in view, present, and available nearly always, making it easy to equate solitude with reclusiveness and withdrawal. It may be time, though, to consider an alternative view — that solitude is not necessarily about social retreat, but instead, a circumstance intrinsic to full human engagement. Solitude and social interaction need not be necessarily exclusive, but rather, circumstances that mutually sustain and inform one another.

During my police chief years, I would often retreat to a men’s room stall before a speech or social engagement. I needed that brief solitude and liminal space. It enabled me to leave behind my anxiousness and transition to a more assured, engaged mindset. As a result, I became more in tune with those around me.

Cartoon by John P. Weiss

As Akiko Busch notes in her essay on solitude:

A doctor friend of mine tells me that when he is attending to patients in the hospital, where things often and easily reach a fever pitch, he takes 30 seconds or so in the stairwell — a transitional space if there ever was one — to close his eyes, to retreat, to meditate in this improvised sanctuary the size of a minute.

As we return to our work lives and greater social engagement, let us not forget the benefits of healthy solitude that perhaps we discovered during the pandemic. Take advantage of those “3o seconds or so in the stairwell,” or wherever your “improvised sanctuary” might be.

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast

One of the things that the COVID-19 pandemic taught me was patience. I had to accept that some things were beyond my control. I learned that taking the long view is not the same as giving up.

American society is often not patient. Personal ambition and the entrepreneurial spirit seem bound to immediate, take no prisoners, action. The business mantra was often “fail often to fail forward.” After the pandemic, this view may be changing.

Consider the following observation about patience from a blog post in CreativeBusinessInc.com:

In a world that prioritizes speed and quick fixes, patience is a virtue often overlooked and underutilized. Perhaps too often we associate it with acquiescence or letting things go, but instead we should see patience as our ability to endure difficult circumstances without compromising ourselves and our values, and to respond to adversity thoughtfully and without frustration or impulse. Studies show that leaders who demonstrate patience can increase the creativity and collaboration of their team by 16% and productivity by 13%.

Consider the elite United States Navy SEALS. In movies, they are often portrayed as taking explosive, decisive action. But in real life, there’s more to the story.

An article in the Harvard Business Review notes:

The U.S. Navy SEALs are known for their saying ‘Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast.’ These rapid-response special forces teams are paradoxically methodical and patient in both planning and executing their time-critical missions. They have learned over 60 years of operating in crisis situations that working at a slow and smooth pace reduces mistakes and re-dos and in the end speeds up the mission.

You don’t have to be a business executive or Navy SEAL to take advantage of patience in your daily life. Here are three tips to improve your patience:

1. Make yourself wait. I know, it sounds crazy, but you can train yourself to become more patient. For example, I often purchase books online and get excited when they arrive on my doorstep. But I set them aside in my study, and wait until after dinner to open them. The self-imposed waiting trains me to be more patient.
2. Do one thing at a time. We all have interrupted lives. Phone calls, texts, emails, and social media rabbit holes compete for our attention. Combat this insane juggling by doing one thing at a time. You’ll likely do a better job on your task, and can reward yourself later with those YouTube distractions.
3. Learn meditation. Stillness and deep breathing can do wonders for your physical and mental health. There are many online apps to help you. Once you learn how to slow down your breathing and the thoughts in your head, you become more centered. You can use your meditation skills when stuck in long lines or waiting rooms, which will improve your patience.

Perhaps patience is the ability to calibrate our own experiences and thoughts, our own expectations and actions, to be in some kind of synch with the world around us. -Akiko Busch

The COVID-19 pandemic is a historical event that will forever change the world and how we live in it. There will new and unexpected challenges going forward.

Embracing healthy solitude, moments of isolation, and the art of patience will help you find more balance, health, and well-being. That’s what the coyotes in my neighborhood seem to do, and they always look serene and happy to me.

Before you go

I’m John P. Weiss. I draw cartoons, write, paint, and shoot black and white photography. Check out my free Saturday Newsletter here.

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This post was previously published on Medium.com.

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Photo credit: iStock