Hi, Christa. This is Elena. I'm calling from Colorado Spring. Right now I'm thinking a lot about transitions, moving things in life, changing friendships, all of that kind of stuff.

And wondering how in the midst of beginnings and endings and everything in between, I stayed grounded and centered and kind of find my footing in a world that is constantly shifting.

I'd love to hear your thoughts on this. Thanks so much.

Thank you, Elena. You know, I've thought a lot over the years. I think being a writer, I mean, I'm not writing all the time, but I think being a writer has contributed to this.

So, better how endings that we really love this idea, and I think we need this, I think our bodies and our brains need this idea of beginnings, middles and endings, and we tell stories that way.

But in the story of real life, you know, it's almost a cliche, but like, the endings are always beginning and what feel like endings are middles.

And I'm kind of fascinated by that in general about how our minds struggle to take that in.

And then here we are in this moment, which also happens in the real, the true life story, that it can happen in any day and any week that, that the phone rings, that something transpires in a relationship or in a job or in this case.

In the world that completely upends our plans and, you know, becomes not just a transition, but a threshold.

I think what so, well, one of the things that's so stressful about this transition threshold is that we don't know what it's moving towards.

We never knew in the days and weeks when this was imminently upon us, we didn't know that everything we had planned up to then was going to be, was going to shift utterly.

And that's just the ordinary ways we have been, we structure our days and our life and our sense of time and space, that that was going to be disrupted.

But more than that, so we still, we know what that life was.

And I think it's clear to all of us that given all the things that are happening, not just the illness around the virus, but all the things that have had to stop and are potentially, you know,

that there's so much that coming out of this is not going to be the same.

And, and that's true of things we really relied on and loved and that just felt ordinary and comforting in the shape of reality.

And it's also true of, you know, I've quoted across these recent years, this notion of what the Greek word apocalypse really means.

And I always cite my friend the Reverend Jen Bailey for reminding me of this, that in the original Greek apocalypse doesn't mean, you know, the catastrophe, it means the uncovering.

And this crisis, this virus, is uncovering a lot of things, it's uncovering our, it's uncovering kindness and generosity, it's uncovering things that we didn't know, we knew how to do, like, cook and clean and be quiet and stay at home.

And it's uncovering our physical frailty that we just have so many devices these days to, to convince ourselves that it's not as true as it always is.

And it's uncovered all these holes and flaws and gaps in the web of our relationship to each other and how we have not structured our society around that.

So, here we are in a communal collective global transition, that's another thing that's different about this transition, that we're all in transition together.

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