Pandemic Companions

Each day we set countless expectations: My coffee will taste good, when I say 'thank you' he'll say 'you're welcome', my team will win. We set these expectations without much thought. But what happens when major parts of life that we're used to taking for granted suddenly stop meeting our expectations? Business coach and cognitive therapist Denise VanEck researches and teaches about the experience of failure. In this conversation she offers concrete steps we can take to recalibrate our expectations.

Nobody in their right mind doubts that communication is key to successful relationships. But spend several weeks cooped up with the same people and — presto! — nobody is spending much time in their right mind. Communication is faltering. Rough edges are showing. Meredith Janson, an Imago therapist and Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Berkeley, California and I discuss what happens when the people you're used to going to for support are themselves ready for a hefty dose of support.

It's been several weeks since many people have seen another person, let alone touched one. Others are in close contact with the same people nonstop. It's unclear when this will change, with the increasing likelihood that we find ourselves locked in patterns of isolation for at least several months. Astra Rooney and Eva Shpak of Freed Bodyworks offer ideas about how we can meet our need for healing touch.

Seemingly opposite states that must coexist over time for success to occur: helping ourselves/helping others, working to make a living/staying at home, hope/reality. You're growing uncomfortably familiar with these phenomena, which we'll call polarities. How do we make sense of them and even thrive? To help us all learn, I spoke to Navigating Polarities co-author Kelly Lewis.

RockSolid Creative Food Group president Chef Rock Harper suggests chicken soups you can make while on lockdown.

It's March 26 and many restaurants that were flying high at the beginning of the month have closed indefinitely, most of them for good. Some are hanging on for dear life by converting to carryout operations. But there's little doubt that how we produce and consume food is undergoing a major, real-time overhaul. RockSolid Creative Food Creative Group president Rock Harper discusses changes to food systems and highlights emerging opportunities for hospitality workers who have been blindsided by the coronavirus pandemic.

Some people are using social distancing as a pretext to break out the good wine. As we all plunge into the unknown, many are having to completely rethink how they will navigate sobriety. I speak with Laura Silverman of The Sobriety Collective and Booze Free in DC for ideas about how to be supportive, from a distance, of loved ones who are in recovery or for whom maintaining sobriety is no mean feat.

We're reinventing on the fly how we connect with the people who matter to us. Vanessa Harnik of luxe greeting card importer Notes and Queries knows the value of cultivating rich relationships even in the best of times. To address our heightened need for community during the coronavirus pandemic, Notes and Queries is working with its international network of publishers to offer an evolving array of free and topical e-cards that we can send to help us stay close.

Millions of parents around the world are busy muddling our first week of being full-time caregiving, breadwinning homebodies. One of the easiest things to lose sight of is how different our worldview is from our children's. Early childhood specialist DJ Schneider-Jensen of Magic and More, Inc. offers advice that will give children freedom to be themselves and parents the opportunity to fully appreciate them from head to toes.

We can spend our lives growing. It's possible to expand into increasingly complex versions of ourselves — physically, emotionally, cognitively, relationally, and spiritually. Yet this growth is not a one way street. We often experience a falling back, in which we lose access to the highest and best versions of ourselves. To explore how the coronavirus pandemic is triggering this phenomenon on a global scale, I speak with adult development expert Valerie Livesay, whose research specialty is fallback.