I’ve spent a lot of time learning how to feel. I remember a therapist saying, Where in your body do you feel that? And I remember thinking, feel? Body? Where? What was he talking about? I remember going to a workshop in my yoga teacher’s apartment in New York and the leader guiding us through visualizing an animal. Mine came up as a giraffe–an animal with a long distance between its head and its body. And then I worked with a coach and friend who kept circling back to how I felt, until, good student that I am (sort of) I got it. I could feel where in my body fury and grief and joy took root. I could answer the question, How are you? … even when the asker actually wanted to know.

So I understand the importance of feelings. The only way to the other side is right through them. Resistance keeps you stuck, and the feelings themselves are not as painful as the forced numbness of avoiding them.

However, I am tired of people asking me how I feel about Cornavirus safety measures. I live in an area that has recently been added to the watchlist of California counties with rising cases. But I live in a town and area of the county that has been largely protected, by privilege, by luck, by privilege that passes as luck but can also be brought down by hubris, from the impacts of the virus, other than that we’ve shut down, stayed in (some of us), masked up (some of us) and schools will start online (all of us). These are huge and drastic changes, but they are not a community swamped by death, hospitals overrun and facing terrible choices, terror-filled days of economically-driven risk (for some of us).

How you handle the virus is a question of calculating and mitigating and balancing various risks. It’s amorphous and hard to determine the correct path. But it is NOT a set of feelings. It shouldn’t be–though it’s become–a political stance per se. It’s a set of ideas, calculations, and choices, and I hope it’s based on research, on a gathering of the best information available, and then engaging in said balancing act of juggling risks. I suppose there is a measure of feeling in it, but I wish people were asking about my thinking. And here is why: science is insanely politicized in this country. And the great thing about science is NOT that it is always right, NOT that it has any god-claims or absolute authority. It’s the opposite. The great thing about science is that built into it is the questioning of each of its claims, the testing of each of its conclusions. And anyone with the skills and equipment should be able to test it and produce the same results. If not, the conclusions have to be thrown out or recalibrated, reconsidered. This is, I think, paralleled in ways to the *theories* of how a democracy runs, dependent not on the declarations of one person but on systems, and providing a way to overturn (through checks and balances, through elections, through protests!) decisions that prove, in time, to be wrong.

And we need this kind of radical flexibility and action and thought in both democracy and science as we face the great challenge of climate crisis. We need NOT to begin and end with how we are feeling–because we are probably afraid and we probably choose denial and avoidance from the place of our feelings, I know I have. Instead, let us inquire as to what we know and what we understand and how we are thinking carefully about it. We need to take action and monitor the results and modify the actions accordingly. We need critical thinking and a commitment to move into and through the feelings without letting them dictate what we do. Because we need to understand the urgency of our response, no matter how we feel, and we need to act now.