This pandemic is changing our world. It is making us question what is important, what is essential. It is bringing to light inequities that have long been hiding in the shadows. It is triggering our fear and our compassion. It is isolating us from our comforting behaviours and from each other and forcing us to look at ourselves. It is hard. It is harder than most things many of us of have done in our lives. It is hard because the regular stresses of our lives are hard for most of us and adding on the extra stresses that living in a pandemic creates makes it even harder. Every person has been impacts by this experience. Every person has a choice in how they respond to this impact and I implore everyone to choose love.

There is so much anger out there being projected at our political leaders, our health leaders, our neighbors, our employers, our families, ourselves. We are all of us doing the best we can in the situation we find ourselves in. Now is the time to look at that anger that may arise within us, to question it, to understand it, to take responsibility for it. It is ours. It may be triggered by other people’s actions, but how we choose to respond to it is our responsibility, choose love. Feeling and then projecting anger, judgement, annoyance, rage is an unloving act to everyone involved. It is unloving to yourself because it helps you avoid the fears and sorrows that lay under the anger. It stops you from being able to reach deeper, past the habitual response to the truth, to the place where healing lives, to the place where those stuck emotions can be free, felt and move on. Choosing anger prevents your own growth, your own ability to love, to feel loved and to act lovingly. Choose love.

Sometimes choosing love doesn’t feel as wonderful as we would expect, at least not at first, because often choosing love means opening up to truth and feeling the errors and the effects of acting on those errors has had on our lives, but if we truly do choose love, we will choose to feel those emotions and move through them. This is when you’d be surprised to find that choosing love feels even more wonderfully than you’d expect. Now is the time to choose love. We all have more time at home, more time to feel and not just react, more time to question ponder, and explore, take it, choose love.

There is so much fear out there right now. Fear for our health and the health of our loved ones. Fear for our welfare and our economy. Fear for our standard of living. So much fear. Choose love. Fear is only an emotion that is meant to be felt. It can move through us to completion. It is not about denying your fear, it is about acting in spite of your fear, of showing the courage that we can all possess, of loving ourselves enough and trusting ourselves enough to know we can move through this. Most of us need help is navigating our emotions at first, help is out there, find a therapist, a YouTube guru, a good journal, whatever you need. Choose love.

Choosing love does not mean denying all of the other emotions, the opposite is true in fact. Choosing love means being aware and allowing all of our emotions to flow, just not allowing them to lead to unloving acts. So if you’re angry, feel angry, hit a pillow, scream and shout, get it out. If you’re scared, be scared. Feel those terrifying feelings, allow yourself to go there, trust that you were built to feel and you can feel this too. Feel it through. Observe yourself, observe what choices you make, question your motivation, give yourself space to feel. Choose love.

We need to choose love for ourselves and how we treat ourselves so we can choose love for others and how we treat others. We are all doing the best we can right now. Is every decision going to be the ‘right’ one? The perfect one for everyone? No, but a decision had to be made and whomever made it did the best they could with what they had at that moment. We need to act ethically, to treat others as we would like to be treated. To remember compassion, even if our fear or anger is triggered. To do our best to be part of the solution which is easier than one might think. Choosing love makes you a part of the solution. It might be through little ways like withholding your anger projected at someone enforcing the new safety laws that may allow them to focus on other work and spread the goodness instead of making them deal with more stresses brought on by the projection of anger. Or it might be through larger ways of taking compassionate action or something else entirely, and it doesn’t really matter because every loving act supports everyone, yourself included. Choose love.

How often in one’s lifetime do they get the opportunity to hermit like we are now being asked to do? Where our distractions are farther away from our fingertips and our travels are limited? We have the opportunity now to use this time to help us figure out why we don’t always choose love. Why we feel as we do, what we truly want, what is important to us, how we can get there and so on and so on and so on. Take the opportunity, choose love.