Hello and welcome to another episode of Mindfulness Plus quarantine edition. My name is Thomas

Mekonki. I'm your host. Speaking of quarantine, I was on my street corner

maybe a month ago. It was nighttime. And I bumped into a neighbor I really enjoy in the hood.

And we were talking from a distance. And I noticed what I perceived to be

a kind of twitchiness in his face, a kind of almost like this PTSD quality, a shakiness, a

trembling quality.

And he was sharing with me, you know, that the pandemic and the quarantine was hitting him

quite hard.

I spent a little time with him and then went on with my walk and came home.

And I told my wife that I'd bumped into one of our neighbors who, you know, seemed really rattled by this whole thing.

And at that time, I had kind of an experience of myself that, you know, I'm an introvert.

I'm a meditator. I'm a meditating introvert.

I was made for quarantine, baby.

So I had this notion that I maybe wasn't as affected as other people, right?

A few days ago, I was out again this time at a park with another friend.

We were hanging out, talking from a distance.

And I was struck that, you know, I hadn't seen this friend in some time.

And he looked a lot like the person in my neighborhood I'd seen on the street corner a month ago. This kind of

hollow look of fear in his eyes, almost a twitchy, traumatized quality in his face. The same signs

and symptoms I'd noticed a few weeks ago on the street corner.

Only this time it impacted me differently.

I saw these qualities in my friend as we were chatting,

...