Rebuilding Our Inner Life (after a hard year of pandemic life)

“Want to learn about a different culture?—Go and live there for a year.” That’s the advice I heard as a college student preparing to do a year abroad. It proved true. You need that much time to really settle into a new experience. Part of it undoubtedly comes from experiencing all four seasons; part also surely comes from the subtle inner changes we make to accommodate to new surroundings. That said, we are now nearly a year into our pandemic experience. The idea that we would just need to “batten down the hatches” for a few months and then life would return back to normal, that idea has proven wrong. Life is different now and will continue to be. With fragmented social connections, disrupted rhythms, and so many streams of vastly different information, it is hard to know how to orient yourself.