The seasons are changing – daily, it seems, at the moment; I mean: what is up with the weather?! – and for a lot of people that marks a good time to go through their closet to evaluate their clothes. It’s no different for me, and I go through the process with my children as well.

With my teenage daughter, it’s surprisingly easy. She is unflinchingly honest about what she likes and what no longer works for her, and she has no trouble discarding what doesn’t belong in her closet anymore. To be fair, she’s had some practice recently, as she’s going through, like, the third growth spurt in a year and has had to change the contents of her closet accordingly several times throughout the past year.

My youngest, however, is a different creature altogether. He is 6 and has SPD (Sensory Processing Disorder) and because of his particular sensibilities he tends to form quite a strong attachment to things: cuddly toys (as a lots of kids do) but also games, the coffee machine, and yes, his clothes. So while I might be disappointed when something no longer feels as comfortable to wear, or just isn’t in line with my style anymore even though I truly love the item in question, he will be devastated when that happens. As it is, he is not great with change, but this kind of thing is even harder for him when he has to help make the decisions and see things being removed.

Now, before I continue, I should just note that this is specific to my son and not a defining trait in anyone who has SPD. I should also note that plenty of children who do not have SPD form deep attachments to things. I’m finding the things I’ve learned about my son’s SPD have helped me understand how these sorts of changes impact him. This post is only about my experiences with my son as we updated his closet, and for parents whose kids are similarly sensitive in this respect it may sound very recognizable.

Right, back to the closet. So my son is similarly going through a growth spurt, and has been growing out of things. Knowing how truly sad it can make him to part with things, I have been trying to make the process a little less painful by initially buying new items of underwear and new pairs of socks before filtering out the old ones. It’s one way to make the process a little less difficult for him, and to make it a little less obvious that some things will be going away for good.

But, as I said before, for certain things I will need him to actively participate in the process of taking out the old in order to evaluate what and how much new will be coming in. In order to make this manageable for him, I clearly set the parameters as well as the rules (“If it’s too small, it has to go”, “You never wear this, so let’s let someone else enjoy it.”). And before you ask: no, it does not help him to know that new clothes will be coming in to replace the ones that are going out. He is simply upset that the ones that have to go will be going.

Some of the items that didn’t make the cut were beloved staples. Others were items that he had grown out of before ever having worn them – this does not diminish his attachment to them. To him, it’s just the idea that these items are at home here and he feels awful when they are – in his mind – evicted. To him, each item has a soul, of sorts.

To my great surprise (and relief) the person who has helped me the most in this process is Marie Kondo. Her method of parting with things has actually made it possible for my son to make his peace with this particular change. After we had finished sorting, we put all the clothes that we would not be keeping on a pile and we thought of how to say goodbye to them, and so I found myself holding up about 20 different t-shirts, sweaters and pairs of pants so he could “thank them for their service”. There were genuine tears, which were not accompanied by loud cries and acting out; just five minutes of him silently crying on my shoulder until he felt like he had come to terms.

What also helped him was knowing that the clothes would be passed down to a boy who lives down the street and who will be happy to wear them. It makes the goodbye less definite, and it give him the idea that the clothes have found a new home rather than just having been discarded. It’s a little like grieving in stages.

My son’s SPD has actually illuminated certain things about myself as well. His attachment to things, his idea that things somehow have feelings is something I am sometimes guilty of too, and was much more so when I was a kid. Except back when I was growing up, SPD was not a thing. We were supposed to stop being silly and just get on with it. No one would take seriously a sense of loss when you had to part with something because, after all, it was just a thing. While there’s something to be said for that approach – the world is not necessarily going to take our sensitivities into account – I’m glad that we handle these things differently today. Diagnosing and observing my son have given me a way to communicate with him in a more friendly and effective way, and it’s also given me the tools to find a healthy balance there: acknowledging the sensitivities while teaching him how to deal with them constructively, so he’s able to handle himself when he gets older.

SPD or not, we could probably all use the space and time sometimes to deal with things that we find unexpectedly difficult, for whatever reason. Awareness and validation of those emotions can really help decrease the negative impact of just barreling through and provide some practical instruments to process change, and that’s something we all need.

It’s been two weeks since the Dutch government decided to close the schools, finally convinced not only by a panel of experts and healthcare specialists, but by public demand for schools to be closed because people were less than thrilled to have their children be potentially exposed to a dangerous virus and in addition become disease vectors, even if – thank goodness – nearly no children appear to become terribly ill from SARS-CoV-2.

In our house, it has been an adjustment, but not nearly as much as I had feared. To be fair, we’re self-isolating in relative luxury: we have enough food, drink and – and apparently this is a thing – toilet paper. (We have not hoarded toilet paper, yet I don’t worry that we’ll run out.) We also have a very pleasant garden with a trampoline and a comfortable seating area and now that the sun is out almost every day we spend a lot of our time outside, albeit with blankets to keep us warm because sunny does not equal warm, sadly.

Of course, modern tech makes situations like these a lot easier than they have ever been before. We have phones, video calling apps, messaging apps, email and social media to stay in touch with those we care about, so we can keep ourselves and each other from feeling entirely isolated, and to help us stay abreast of what’s happening elsewhere in the world. Not to mention the access technology gives us to the information that is currently available on this strange, new virus. (Please try to limit yourself to information that is scientifically sound, and to cut out misinformation, disinformation and uninformed talking heads that are seeking to use this situation to sow division. We’ve got enough to deal with right now. This is a global pandemic; let’s look at how we can beat this together – apart, but together.)

The children have adapted to their new reality quite well; both the 12-year old and the 5-year old understand that keeping physical distance from others is important to keep everyone safe, not just ourselves. We’re trying as much as we can to keep a certain routine to our day: get up around 7 am, get dressed, have breakfast, do schoolwork while taking regular breaks for trampoline jumping, and then do some cleaning up at the end of the day before getting ready for dinner, and then bed.

With all that we’re doing to help flatten the curve in order for our healthcare system not to become overwhelmed, we still see people taking this thing lightly, and it astounds me. What we know about this virus is scary, what we don’t know is scarier still.

Things we know (or think we do):

• R0 for SARS-CoV-2 at the moment is anywhere from 1.4 to 3.4 – those numbers don’t sound so bad, but exponential growth is a bitch;
• elderly people and people with underlying health conditions are more likely to fall very ill with COVID-19 than others;
• it’s likely that the disease can be spread by people who are asymptomatic;
• a majority of people who catch COVID-19 will have mild symptoms (which can still be very unpleasant);
• the incubation period for SARS-CoV-2 is 2 – 14 days, though most people will start feeling ill after 5 days;
• younger people are at risk, too;
• some survivors will have permanent lung damage;
• healthcare workers and institutions will become completely overwhelmed if we don’t manage to flatten the curve;
• practicing social distancing and keeping 1.5 meters distance from others when you do go out, washing your hands well and regularly, and coughing and sneezing into your elbow instead of your hand can help prevent infection.

Things we don’t know:

• why younger, seemingly perfectly healthy people are also ending up in hospital with COVID-19 and even dying – here is a breakdown per age group (compiled on 23 March 2020);
• why men seem more likely to fall seriously ill and even die than women;
• how long COVID-19 patients remain infectious;
• whether this virus is likely, like seasonal flu, to produce seasonal strains that might make people sick again, even if they’ve already had this strain;
• whether, like the Spanish flu of 1918, COVID-19 will hit us in waves;
• and, as a result, how long all of this is going to take.

With all this, some things should really be perfectly clear to everyone by now. We don’t want to reach the point where healthcare workers need to start deciding who they will treat and who they won’t – as is already the case in Italy, for instance – simply because there is not enough capacity to treat everyone who falls ill with this virus. We don’t want to find ourselves in a situation where Corona cases so overwhelm the system that there is no more capacity for treating other, non-Corona patients, whether they be patients who require urgent care or patients whose care might not be urgent now, but whose care will become urgent if they don’t receive timely treatment. If that happens, it won’t only be COVID-19 patients that die, but there will be many more other and otherwise preventable deaths.

And, finally, we don’t want healthcare workers working in hazardous conditions in gear that is not sufficiently suited to protecting them from infection. We need to protect these people as they are putting in superhuman efforts to save as many as they can, despite being completely overwhelmed by this outbreak. It should not even need saying that when healthcare workers start falling away, we will be in an unimaginable world of trouble.

The reality we currently find ourselves in is, for want of a more sophisticated word, a running shit show. Effective, informed decisions to prevent the scope of this epidemic should have been made much earlier, but we’re past that point. Now, politics should not have anything to do with how anyone sees this clear and present danger. I didn’t think it was possible, but even under these circumstances, left and right seem to have become even further entrenched and alienated, and it’s because facts and reality have been relegated to the sidelines over the past few years as battle lines were drawn.

This being what it is, no-one’s politics will protect them from the reality of what COVID-19 is doing to everyone around the world. This virus is complex, and there is no silver bullet. One of the main problems we face today is that people who choose to, or are convinced to, set aside the facts in favor of some politician’s desired and often imaginary outcome become a danger to others because they refuse to implement the measures that will keep not only themselves, but also those others safe.

I can’t wrap my head around that. All I can do is make sure that I and my family are as safe as we can be, and to self-isolate until this pandemic is under control. That’s going to take time, but if a little discomfort now means we can still have a later, we’ll be safe, rather than sorry, not just for ourselves, but for everyone else as well.

Finally, a massive thank you to everyone putting themselves in harm’s way to help us through this: EMTs, nurses, doctors, sanitation workers, police, firemen, military personnel, chefs, delivery workers, supermarket staff, pharmacy staff, drugstore staff, and the many others that are keeping our society running. I can’t thank you enough – you’re our superheroes!

The morning after new measures were announced to try and contain the spread of SARS-CoV2 in the Netherlands schools are still not closing, the logic being that schools are not very international environments and children don’t seem to get very sick anyway. Also, children staying home from school prevents parents in healthcare professions, for instance, from going to work, because the children need to be cared for.

The problem with that logic is that we don’t know exactly how this things spreads and whether it can also spread from asymptomatic carriers of the virus. Children who are carriers can and likely will spread the illness at home. Parents working in those crucial professions will then still catch and carry the illness (purpose of measure defeated), either becoming sick themselves or potentially exposing more vulnerable people.

A current R0 of 2.5 for this thing means that between 40% and 70% of the world population would become infected with Corona: https://theweek.com/speedreads/897799/harvard-scientist-predicts-coronavirus-infect-70-percent-humanity

Containment is vital at this point if we want to prevent Italian situations, as experts in the field of epidemiology are warning us: https://nos.nl/l/2326881 (in Dutch), and evidence suggests that school closures are among the more powerful weapons we have to flatten the curve: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/03/does-closing-schools-slow-spread-novel-coronavirus.

There have been reports from Brabant that there is already not enough capacity to test medical personnel at this point in time – https://www.bd.nl/brabant/medewerkers-van-brabantse-ziekenhuizen-niet-meer-getest-op-corona~a5dafe4f/ (in Dutch) – nor are we able to find the source of each infection, which is worrying: https://www.rivm.nl/en/news/current-information-about-novel-coronavirus-covid-19

Last night, our PM spent a lot of time not really answering questions as to why other countries seem capable of closing their schools when we apparently are not (though he did say at one point that he wouldn’t mind closing schools if the advice to do so was stringent enough and he felt it was feasible): https://nos.nl/l/2326914 (in Dutch). Thankfully, at least a motion was passed last night declaring that parents who do choose to keep their children home preventatively will not be faced with fines. It’s a start.

As a side note: unfortunately one of the loudest voices for more far-reaching measures in the debate was one of our extreme right wing politicians, Geert Wilders. While he made good points regarding the virus and our inadequate measures of containment, I am fearful that this will give him more of a political foothold, which would be detrimental for our country, as the rest of his political platform is worryingly xenophobic at best.

But I digress.

One of the biggest problems we face at the moment in this country is that many people still underestimate the seriousness of this disease. The Dutch will say this is “Nederlandse nuchterheid” (Dutch down-to-earthness ), to which I say: there is a fine line between that and negligence/stupidity. Even confronted with truly horrible scenes in Italy, many Dutch people still seem to feel like Corona won’t hit us as hard even if we don’t take the recommended containment measures. That is an illusion.

Even if it is true that many people will likely not become seriously ill from SARS-CoV2, we have a vulnerable share of the population to take into account for which this illness is potentially fatal, and a responsibility to each other – despite expectations that most people who fall ill will recover – not to infect one another if we can prevent it. If you need it put in plainer terms: I don’t think anyone would be particularly thrilled if their friends infected them with an illness, even if they wouldn’t die from the result.

We will have to wait and see how this develops, but for the time being our family is being extra careful and running as little risk as possible, both for our own safety and for the safety of others. We hope others will do the same.

I just did 20 minutes of bed yoga. This was my first real yoga session in two months. (This post comes from a place of frustration – just so you know. Feel free to skip past the lament and straight to the last five paragraphs or so.)

Since mid-August I’ve been struggling with a running train of health issues, starting with bursitis in my right shoulder. It forced me to a near standstill, partly due to pain and partly because I needed to take care not to let it get out of hand to the point where it would require a corticosteroid injection into the joint (I have experience with those in my other shoulder, and if they can be avoided – avoid them!).

What happened next was pretty much my own fault. Here’s what happened.

We’ve been doing some house and garden renovations. The garden was done entirely by a rather brilliant gardening company who turned our back garden into a thing of beauty– for the first time in years, we actually spent time in our garden, enjoying the weather and relaxing in comfort. But the garden wasn’t the only thing we decided to change.

The living room also got a revamp, and a lot of that was (IKEA) DIY. Now, people who know me will tell you that I tend to attack these projects with reckless (stupid?) abandon, and this project was no exception. There was a couch to be put together and a TV/audio cabinet/book/display case to be built and I was on it! Since the bursitis was in decline, I got cocky and basically spend three days hammering, sawing, lifting, and doing general construction, taking as few breaks as I could because I wanted it done.

This was after I’d spent several hours the weeks before taking apart bookcases after emptying them of what I can only describe as a mountain of books and moving those books into boxes and those boxes around the living room in anticipation of the new furniture arriving.

Now, when I do things like this, I am not particularly good at paying attention to my physical well-being. For instance, I am perfectly capable of ending up with bloody scratches and bruises in strange places without being able to reconstruct the specific events leading to them.

Which is how I broke a bone in my hand. Not sure what I did exactly, but broken it was.

Quite painful, really, especially the first few days in the cast.

It was around that time, incidentally, that I also noticed a painful spot around a vertebra (which I think I can trace back to hitting my back hard against a table while moving around furniture, but I can’t be sure – it’s a particular talent; what can I say?). That painful spot is only marginally less painful 4 weeks on.

All of the above is not to invite you to a pity party, just really to illustrate the self-inflicted nonsense I’ve been dealing with these past 2 months.

And as I said earlier, it’s brought me to a near standstill.

And, as I also said earlier, this morning was my first yoga session in 2 months. It was only 20 minutes of bed yoga, but that’s the only yoga I can do at the moment. My hand and wrist have been painful, stiff and near devoid of strength since the cast came off, and I can’t really place any weight on them, which makes a lot of yoga poses quite difficult (downward facing dog, cat cow, cobra, and so on). So the asanas for now will have to be mostly focused on mobility and flexibility, and any surface I practice on will have to be soft yet supportive, both for my hand/wrist and my back – i.e. bed yoga.

It felt so good to finally be doing yoga again. If I’m honest, it wasn’t just the injuries that kept me from practicing; I’ve also been in a bit of a funk since all of these issues started. Pain is demotivating and exhausting, not to mention it makes you pretty damn cranky! But as, since all this started, I’ve gotten only a fraction of the exercise and movement that I used to get as recently as 4 months ago, I’m now seeing a massive decline in strength and mobility. This morning’s session really brought that home for me: I was sluggish and inflexible, and I spent most of the session pushing past the discomfort in various parts of my body.

I also spent a lot of time comparing what I was able to do this morning to what I was able to do not too long ago. Beginner king dancer? Forget it! Crow? Pipe dream at this point. Supported head stand? Umm, no. Eight angle pose? I don’t even want to think about it! And I used to be able to do those poses!!

That said – and this is the good part – it felt so good to finally pick up my yoga again. Nothing has really been forgotten; I still spend a good part of my day thinking about the various poses, yoga philosophies, how to get used to yoga with fewer asanas for the time being, and how I can incorporate what I’m going through into what I hope one day to be a practice that includes others: a practice that aims to help people in similar situations to me, people who have injuries that prevent them from doing the asanas that an undamaged body can do.

It’s also helpful for me to see that I need to make a mental adjustment. While I firmly believe that it’s good to keep striving for progress – of course it is! – doing it just for that reason to me means I’ve been doing it for the wrong reasons of late. I need to do the yoga that is good for me, both physically and mentally. I shouldn’t be doing it to show off how advanced my poses are and how “good” I am at yoga. If you do yoga and you’re doing it well – that is: in a way that is good for your body and mind – then you’re good at yoga. More than that: don’t do yoga to be good at yoga. Do it because yoga is good for you.

Maybe it’s a reminder I needed. For a yogi, I’ve been pretty damn awful at listening to my body, always pushing too far. It’s in my nature, but it’s not exactly healthy or sensible. And it’s certainly not yoga.

So here’s what I’ve concluded: I’m pretty stubborn so life has given me a kick in the butt after repeated and futile gentle nudges. I guess for me the lesson here is to take the subtle hints a little better from here on in. I hope I’m not too old to learn.

I’m back here on my blog for the first time in two years. Not counting the political upheaval and all its emotional and real-world repercussions, these have been challenging years – especially this past one.

And precisely because this is true, I have been trying to count my blessings every day, and to enjoy the little things, the moments, the people that make my life special and that keep me going.

So with that in mind: have a very merry Christmas, everyone, and enjoy the holiday season! Stop long enough to recognize and soak up the small things, the moments, the people. It really only takes a few seconds and it’s absolutely worth it!