Are We There Yet?
As a kid I would drive my parents crazy. Whether it was on the way to my grandparents bungalow in Portnoo or on the way to the caravan in Portrush I could be heard asking, “Are we there yet?” After a while my sister and I would be bouncing around in the back seat of the car chanting, “Are we there yet? Are we there yet? Are we there yet?”
As children we had no framework for understanding distance or time. All we wanted to know was when would the journey be over, when would we reach our destination?
As an adult I embarked on a different kind of journey, long distance running. My longest race was the Comrades Marathon in South Africa. About 56 miles or 90k of running between the cities of Durban and Pietermaritzburg. It was a tough journey that took you through the valley of 10,000 hills under the African sun with 12,000 of your closest friends. On multiple occasions during this run I would wonder if I would make it. Each kilometre was marked on the course and they slowly counted down to one and as each one went by I knew I was getting closer to the finish line.
This is not the way things are with the COVID-19 stay at home order. In Minnesota we had a stay at home order issued in March that was set to expire on April 10th. That order was then extended to expire on May 4th. Are we there yet? No, yesterday that order was extended to May 18th and it’s taking a toll on people.
The ever moving finish fine is difficult to deal with. Many people are struggling with the lack of clarity that we have. We are wondering, will the finish line be moved again? Is there an end to this? I get it, I can’t imagine seeing the 2k to go marker at Comrades and then, when getting to what should be the 1k marker, discovering that it had been changed to 15k to go.
The way I ran Comrades and the other ultra-marathons I ran was to take it one step at a time. “Keep moving, keep smiling” was my mantra. When the finish was fifty miles away you can’t think about that, you can only focus on how to get through the next mile, or at times even as little as the next few steps. If you do that you will eventually get to the end. Small chunks at a time. Celebrate small victories, especially when it’s hard and you wonder if you’ll make it.
In his classic work, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Fankl notes the dramatic spike in deaths in the concentration camp between Christmas 1944 and the new year. The suspected cause was that people had placed their hope in being free by that time. When they were not, they lost their reason for living and the death toll went up. Frankl refers to this as a “naive hope.” The finish line had moved.
Frankl quotes Nietzche saying, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.” We are not there yet, there is no definitive finish line, the key is learning to become keenly aware of the reason for the journey we are on at the moment. For me it is the constant reminder that this is about loving your neighbor, caring about the most vulnerable in our society. What’s your why?
Are we there yet? No, but keep moving and keep smiling, focus on the next step, not the finish line.
