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It\u2019s our body\u2019s natural response to stress. Anxiety is asking us to overcome and deal with some hard, new truths. And I\u2019m learning to harbor a healthy level of it and not let anxiety swallow me whole. Just last week the idea of home-schooling my three children had me making a color-coded flowchart for electronic devices, Zoom meetings, classroom assignments, daily chores and book reports. By noon I was polishing the silver, and an hour later I walked the dog around the block twice. By 3 p.m. I had frantically vacuumed the living room like Magda in \u201cThere\u2019s Something About Mary.\u201d<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve since scaled back my manic, all-consuming need to control my family\u2019s new daily routine. I\u2019m trying to encourage my kids to embrace the simplicity in mastering a few life skills instead. I have them reluctantly cooking from scratch, typing, doing laundry, exercising and honing their mental math by measuring out mom\u2019s perfect martini. Sure, my offspring work a few daily assignments online with their teachers, but we\u2019re still searching for the right fit with compassion, routine, love and a dash of formal learning.<\/p>\n
By nightfall, I\u2019m emotionally and physically spent, but in spite of my third-rate home-school program, I\u2019m finding the happy.<\/p>\n
Fear<\/span><\/p>\nThis is the emotion that shows our ugly, warty underbelly. Fear is what makes us ignore the other person in the same grocery aisle and what makes us all run out for a year\u2019s supply of toilet paper. Fear has people buying into half-baked opinions by a full-fledged narcissist and has us questioning the authenticity of the world\u2019s top infectious disease scientists.<\/p>\n
But if legitimate fear is a result of COVID\u2019s alarming rate of infection and death, then its unpredictability and economic disruption serve to exacerbate that feeling. What a wily tool for someone who thrives on keeping us in one of our most primal, innate, hardwired and automatic states of emotion.<\/p>\n
Fear plays into our phobias and fuels our desire for safety. It\u2019s what permits some of us to sit and swallow daily, irrational remarks with unconditional devotion. To move through fear mongering, I\u2019m finding the facts without accepting \u201cjust a feeling\u201d from the Situation Room. And I promise not to hoard any more toilet paper.<\/p>\n
Change<\/span><\/p>\nI\u2019m one of those exasperating, rolling-stone types that thrive on stressful situations, well out of my comfort zone. Confined in the same routine for too long, I become a teenage pimple ready to pop.<\/p>\n
So, not surprisingly, I\u2019ve been training my whole life for this moment of COVID-confusion and thinking outside-of-the-lines panoramic pandemic.<\/p>\n
And, if we can see the subtle order in the chaos and confusion, we will be stronger on the other side. The massive disruption we are facing both locally and internationally may just be the change we can gift future generations. I\u2019m banking on it with the stimulus check that should be arriving by the end of April.<\/p>\n
And in the meantime? I will employ due diligence on tackling everything I can realistically achieve, aiming to please the ones I love.<\/p>\n
And for the things out of my control? Well, that\u2019s just a \u201cnasty, snarky question.\u201d<\/p>\n
Andrea Chacos lives in Carbondale, balancing work and happily raising three children with her husband. She strives to dodge curveballs life likes to throw with a bit of passion, humor and some flair.<\/p>\n
via:: Post Independent<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"COVID-19 is causing the social disruption I\u2019ve been yearning for since watching the early 1960s television show \u201cLeave it to Beaver\u201d as a child. And it\u2019s not for the ability to clean my house wearing a dress and pearls like June Cleaver, but it\u2019s for the new normal I want to embrace on the other […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[160],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1319425","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-27 14:51:59","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSKE Ski Country","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319425","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1319425"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319425\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1319433,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1319425\/revisions\/1319433"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1319425"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1319425"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kske\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1319425"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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