It seems as though the world as we know it has come to a collective stand still. Each day I wake up confused, and no longer eager for what the day may bring; I know what the day is going to bring. Yet again, I will experience a 24-hour period in which I won’t see my friends, I won’t have a place to go outside of my bed or my couch, and I will spend the hours in which I am not asleep either reading or mindlessly scrolling. This uncertainty is maddening, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t desperately longing to go back in time about 6 weeks. I am having a really hard time living away from campus, something that I know many of my peers are also feeling.

That said, I have found some solace. I’ve been able to push through two books that were not assigned to me academically, and am now reading my third. When I was younger, I was pretty much actively against the Harry Potter series. I thought it was for weird kids who were into weird sci-fi things, while I was more into books that told stories that were realistic. At least, that’s what I said—in actuality, my favorite series were Twilight, The Hunger Games, and a series called Cirque Du Freak that was more or less about vampires. However, this semester I took a class about coming-of-age literature, and much to my dismay, one of the titles we were assigned was Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. This came as such a bummer, I had actually read this first book in the series when I was younger and I remember thinking it sucked. On top of that, the rest of the titles for this course pretty much all excited me, with the second exception of Great Expectations. In high school, it wasn’t often that I actually read a book that was assigned to me. I’d say I read maybe 25% of the books I was supposed to, and I sparknotes’d the other 75%. Since I got to Michigan, I have made a point of reading pretty much every book I’ve been assigned (it definitely helped that I had to pay for these books with my own money). So, begrudgingly mind you, I read the first Harry Potter book. I am now in the middle of reading the fourth Harry Potter book. Rowling’s world building abilities are unmatched in my opinion, and it’s been nice to immerse myself in a world that isn’t falling apart…

This quarantine has also given me the excuse to catch up with some really important people who I haven’t gotten the chance to talk to in years. A couple weeks ago, my friend Josh and I set up a Zoom reunion for the summer program we attended in 2014. Six years later, it felt like we were right back at that same camp in Wisconsin, as if the six years that had passed since some of us saw each other never even happened. We stayed on the Zoom call from roughly 8:30 PM to about 2 in the morning. I left that call with such a full heart; these people had been the most important people in the world to me, not even that long ago, and to be able to catch up all together like that was so unbelievably special.

About a week later, I FaceTimed a friend who I had roomed with for six weeks the summer of 2015, and had gone to Israel with in the summer of 2016. I hadn’t seen or spoken to her in probably three years. We talked for a little over two hours, and again, it felt like nothing had changed. We picked up right where we left off the last time we saw each other.

I’ve also started a 21-day meditation challenge with my mom, and while I’m only on the second day, that is already proving to be really great. I think in the state of the world we’re in, it’s easy to get caught up in all of the shitty things that are going on; I honestly may even venture to say that it’s justified. It seems like just last month there was a new bad development every day, and now it feels like there’s a new bad development five times a day. While I know it is increasingly difficult to think about the positive, especially because for many, the positive is so limited, it can still be fairly therapeutic. The idea of mindfulness, and paying attention to the present moment and the present moment only, has had such an incredible impact on the days when I choose to meditate.

While I know this blog post is simply a life update in a time when there isn’t even much to update on, it’s still just to say that, contrary to what many seem to believe, there are still ways to make the most of such an awful situation. Read a book, call a friend who you haven’t spoken to in awhile, meditate. This has forced us out of our social routines, true, but this has also forced us to pause and take a step back. We as a people living in such a technologically dominated and advanced age forget to just take care of ourselves far, far too often.

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