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| My volunteer potato plant |
Yesterday I spent most of the day working in the yard. I was actually planted something - a potato that came up volunteer in the compost. I had intended to plant a sweet potato from the grocery store, but when I started to screen the compost, I found this guy. Sometime last year, I tossed an old potato into the bin and buried it. Over the winter, that forgotten potato sprouted and struggled up through several inches of dirt to reach the light.
In the midst of a global pandemic, it seems wrong to kill anything so determined to make a life for itself. So I planted it instead.
It’s obvious, BTW, that we are going to run out of garden soil rather quickly. No way is there enough compost to start a large garden. But that is definitely not today’s issue. My real problem is my distracted brain.
Every day, I’m scatterbrained and emotional, and I struggle to complete any task. Admittedly, there would be something truly wrong with me if I felt happy right now in the midst of the COVID-19 outbreak. The U.S. if facing a highly contagious pandemic with inadequate medical supplies, no known treatments, thousands of deaths and a global recession – I’d be a monster if I were fine with all that. Nevertheless I would like to be a little more fine than I currently am.
The primary way I’m functioning right now (when I'm not "misery scrolling" on Facebook or reading and re-reading the latest news) is by “bitting.” A bit is the smallest unit of information processed by a computer, either a zero or a one. Bits are usually grouped into larger units called bytes. Bitting is taking things one very tiny piece at a time.
This is how it looks in my life: People are dying, I’m terrified for everyone around me (including myself). What can I do? Okay, there's a lot of laundry sitting around. Maybe I can match three pairs of socks. Great, I did that. Now I can fold two tee-shirts. What’s the next little thing I can do? Eventually the stack of laundry disappears.
It would be way more efficient if I could manage larger data packets right now, but my mind is not in the kind of a place. I’m happy just to be moving forward, a millimeter or two at a time. And to be healthy, at a moment when so many are literally struggling for their lives.
