"This is what I have been trained for."

It’s a strange feeling, these past twenty-four hours. Many people have described time-distortion as the normal rhythms of daily activities are twisted in strange ways by the shared experience of COVID-19. My version of that distortion this morning is a crystalized awareness of each word, each moment, each breath. They don’t flow together in the ordinary way. When I say “hello” to my son, it has a sharper significance than it does ordinarily. That word stands alone. When I eat a bite of oatmeal, it has a far richer taste. That is the only bite.

My daughter Laura is a nurse practitioner, now working on the front lines of her Oregon county’s response to the virus. She has described many emotions as that work continues (like despair and exhaustion), but also among them is an odd sense of exhilaration. She told me, “This is what I have been trained for. And it now has significance to us all.”

I’m feeling something similar. Her words come out of nursing and public health and my words come from this morning’s virtual zazen, but I’ll repeat what Laura said. “This is what we have been trained for. And it now has significance for us all.” I don’t know why the quality of the breathing of a physician in a hospital in Missouri adjusts my posture as I sit so many miles away, but I don’t need to know why. It just does.

Or watching Barbara’s face on the laptop screen after zazen as she describes the comfort she finds in a passage of Bach’s great oratorio, St. Matthew Passion. As she is talking, I find myself hearing not her words, but that actual music. Again, I don’t know why that happens, and I don’t need to know.

This all reminds me of an elderly crossing guard in Tokyo, directing pedestrian traffic at the vehicle entrance to an office building. This was just a month after the Fukushima tsunami and nuclear reactor catastrophe in 2011. He was halting and then moving people on the sidewalk as if all our lives depended on doing it safely. We were so very far from the actual devastation that tsunami brought and yet it was another crystalline experience. For him too, “This is what I have been trained for. And it now has significance to us all.”

Time, space, and our senses are shifting. Let’s put those shifts to work as we care for people.