Up Again, Old Heart!

Recovery from the last eighteen months, especially for our healthcare workforce, will require rest. Without it, burnout is a real risk. Even if we aren’t caring for patients or loved ones and feel as though we have handled the challenges presented by COVID-19 with grace, every one of us still needs to carve out time to rest our bodies and our minds. The collective energy of the last year has affected young and old, canine and feline alike, whether or not we are consciously aware of how the accumulated stress has changed us.

Despite the fact that resting is restorative and also necessary for the creative mind, I am finding it difficult to do so. It still feels as if the world is on tilt. With the people of Afghanistan, Lebanon, and Haiti suffering harrowing blows, the Delta variant threatening our tentative return to normalcy, and 24-7 news channels eager to spread the bad news, even the dogs in the neighborhood are picking up on the negativity in the air. My neighbor’s dog Louie, a yappy but once-affable eighty-pound old hound dog, broke through his electric fence and ran across the road, snapping at me and my eight-month-old Portuguese water dog puppy this week. I loudly convinced Louie to go home, and aside from the jolt to my blood pressure, we all went on our way without visible scars. This is the second dog in the last month, however, that decided to brave the voltage and bolt free into our path. Walking my dogs is usually a form of recovery for me, but lately it feels as if I am under fire every time I leave the house.

Inside my home, rest evades me because there is unlimited opportunity to immerse myself in work. In July, I guided a health-related writing workshop for the International Writer’s Program at the University of Iowa. The participants are talented writers, physicians, filmmakers, poets and artists from all over Africa, and you will be hearing from some of them soon in a special section. The stories from this group of creative souls have stolen my empathy and admiration—and made me outraged at the brazen disregard for human life in some of the places they call home. Once there are faces and stories attached to these larger issues, they transform from news feed items into human issues, and hopefully inspire solutions that are restorative. The power of story is that strong: it reaches around the world, across time zones, and exposes corruption near and far.

If the pandemic isn’t enough for all of us to understand that we are one world, I’m not confident anything will be. Writers in this issue once again come from all corners of the world, but their stories and poems address universal themes, demonstrating how similar our basic human needs make us all. Aremu Adebisi from Lagos writes of family loyalty when his older brother experiences mental and physical harm. Evelina Kvartunaite from Lithuania presents a digital drawing that captures the strength beneath her differently abled muse. Jennifer Ng from the US writes about the growing cultural gap within Chinese families as well as the bias that she experiences as a Chinese American. Many of the stories in this issue remind us we still have work to do in places near and far.

Yet rest we must! Life is short and precious; we’ve been reminded of that time and again over the last eighteen months. How do you want to spend the next minute, hour, day? I’ve turned off the inflammatory news feed, limited my dose of social media to music and people that make me laugh, and am working on getting mind, body and spirit back to baseline. I’m reading and turning to good stories as an escape, binging Yellowstone, and reliving the Field of Dreams experience. I’m trying to reclaim the innate idealism I held while an undergraduate English major, when I used to keep a slush pile of quotes pulled from literature I was reading nearby on my desk. The following from Ralph Waldo Emerson came back to me this week while searching for a positive way to begin this issue:

“Never mind the ridicule, never mind the defeat: up again, old heart! — it seems to say, — there is victory yet for all justice; and the true romance which the world exists to realize, will be the transformation of genius into practical power.”

In the end, it’s not about how the world at large wears us down, it’s about corralling the strength and the courage to get back up every day to fight the good fight.

Tracy Granzyk is the editor in chief of Please See Me.