I need some encouragement so bad that I’ll take it from a billboard. Drove past this sign a few times and the direct message spoke to me. It’s simple. It sums up how many of us are feeling. There are times when I’m busy and keep going because work and children don’t stop. There are demands that must be met. But, then the quiet settles in, like now, when the kids are at summer camp for the morning and I haven’t started work.

In those moments, the unease begins to seep into my thoughts. It’s as if there’s something terrible in the room with me that I can’t quite see because it’s too awful. My mind is shutting it out. If I take it in, the breadth of the pandemic, the daily death count, the economic devastation, mixed with the unrest in the country as Election Day approaches, I’ll be overwhelmed.

One article I read that speaks to this feeling is about our surge capacity being overloaded.

Surge capacity is a collection of adaptive systems — mental and physical — that humans draw on for short-term survival in acutely stressful situations, such as natural disasters. But natural disasters occur over a short period, even if recovery is long. Pandemics are different — the disaster itself stretches out indefinitely.

So, as the indefinite stretches on, all I can say is “It ain’t easy, but keep going.”

Keep going, friends.