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If I had to choose one word to define the moment, it’s velleity. It’s a wish or desire that isn’t quite strong enough to lead to action. So… wanting the pandemic to be over, but not enough to enter a complete lockdown for four weeks. Wanting a different president or lawmakers, but not enough to vote.

Velleity—at least the way I’ve always heard it used—is an internal impulse. The individual doesn’t want to use the energy to take the logical steps to turn the wish into reality, separating it from situations where the person would like to move the wish to reality but can’t because there is an obstacle such as time or money or a lack of knowledge.

So it’s a situation where the person has five dollars and says they would love to get a drink, but they take no steps to purchase said drink, even though they have the means and initial desire to do so. Which is different from the person who has no money and is thirsty and can’t take care of that want or need.

Because I’ve had nothing but time to think and plenty of velleity examples around me, I’ve been trying to separate out what comes from not enough internal energy vs. being influenced by external actions. For instance, with the pandemic, I think the reason so many people dine out or go on trips or get together with friends—all things we’ve been both cautioned not to do by medical professionals and encouraged to do by politicians—is because they know an individual’s actions can’t create the impact to solve the problem. I can stay home, and that (hopefully) keeps me from getting it, but it doesn’t make a true dent in getting rid of the pandemic. We need everyone to do the same for that to happen, and if they’re not, it’s hard to keep up the energy to keep taking action to turn the wish into reality. Which is why we’re in our eighth month of this.

In that case, the impulse is external. It’s the other people around you. If they were doing something different, you’d find the energy to turn that wish (ending the pandemic) into a reality. You’d be fueled by the energy of others. Sure, it’s equally possible that your actions are tied to guilt, but that’s a different post. I’m talking about harnessing energy from the collective (external) to power the individual (internal) and get over the gap inherent in the term velleity.

It’s the million dollar question: how do you convert the “won’ts?” The can’ts are a different story, but the won’ts—that lack of desire to expend the energy to create the change you wish to see—can change. We know that people vote when we create voting options or help people get to the polls. We know there are ways to get people to act when they have the initial spark of intention.

We are a little bit more than one month away from an election. Do not count on other people to turn your wishes into action. If you have the wish, make things happen.

I was not aware that Maryland had the longest escalator in the Western Hemisphere. I have been on this escalator numerous times. Our Metro system has a lot of long escalators, and this one didn’t strike me as any different from the other ones.

Anyway, I have looped back to a point I was at earlier in the pandemic; willing to click on articles like that and mentally plan out trips for when we can travel again. I’ve bookmarked places in the US, Canada, or Mexico, assuming we’ll be able to drive before we’ll be able to fly. (I also spent an evening trying to figure out whether a person could drive all the way from Maryland to Chile. Some sites claimed you could drive the whole way. Other sites stated that you’d hit a point in Panama that was not passable by car, so you’d have to fly for a portion of it.)

The only other place I’ve been to on this list is the Mustard Museum in Wisconsin. I even took Josh there once early in our relationship when we were visiting Madison. It’s awesome. Thumbs up to its inclusion on the list.

Have you been to the weird tourist attraction in your state? And what do you think of their choice?

Yom Kippur begins tonight, and my plan is to spend the day cleaning and getting my home and life in order so I can go into the holiday concentrating on the reason for the holiday. I love that our new year falls in autumn with the start of school. It always felt like the holidays were fortuitously positioned as a space to get your life in order before classes kicked into high gear.

We went down to one shul membership this year. For many years, we belonged to two shuls, but we left one, so we’re down to one. It doesn’t quite feel correct to say that we switched shuls, but we’re back with old friends and old services, albeit via Zoom.

The thing I’m looking forward to most tonight is something that I have no clue will happen. For many years, our shul had this gorgeous melody for “Adon Olam,” that is only used this one time each year. It’s not a common tune, and I’ve never heard it anywhere else, so my only chance to hear everyone sing it is this one night per year. (Admittedly, the man who brought the tune to our shul made me a recording of it years ago, so I can technically listen to a single person singing it any time I want, but this is the only time to hear everyone singing it together.)

I have no clue if they still use it, and it’s the final song in the service. But it’s a good kind of anticipation, sprinkled with hope, that I’ll hear it tonight.

One of the hardest things about the pandemic is the uncertainty of when it will end and what life will look like when we finally declare it over. Like infertility—I knew that it couldn’t literally last forever, but I had no clue when/if we would reach parenthood and what that would look like. So I spent a lot of time struggling to know how to make decisions. And I’m mentally back there again. The pandemic cannot last forever (right?), but I have zero clue what our lives will look like or what we’ll have/need when it ends.

I recently read a great piece on Substack about knowing relief is coming is sometimes more powerful than the relief itself. Evie Ebert tells a story about keeping jellybeans in her bra during a long distance run to explain how having a plan in place to get through work and lack-of-daycare gave her the mental strength to keep going.

When she would hit a wall while running, she would eat the jellybeans: “The first bite of those jellybeans, half-melted by tit sweat, gave me the thrust to keep moving. I needed the sugar but I also just needed to know relief was coming.”

Relief is coming.

If we could just know for certain that relief is coming—that we will be taken care of as humans on this earth (artificially national boundaries be damned)—we could gain a burst of energy. But that isn’t what is happening. And I don’t have a lot of faith that the world is going to actually come together as Team Earth and weather this.

I’m voting this fall for Biden because I believe he has the greatest chance of getting us a nationwide (and hopefully, worldwide) plan, though I also know that my local elections are just as important as the decisions that impact us nationally. Get a voting plan, everyone. Know how you’re going to cast your ballot this fall.

Anne Bogel, Modern Mrs. Darcy, wrote a post years ago that she recently linked to again about boundary setting. Some people are great with setting firm boundaries. I am not one of these people. I am good at the initial impulse to set the boundary, but then I start to worry—either about how the boundary will impact the other person or my future self. Or, more often, I don’t even realize that I’ve crossed a boundary point I should have set until I realize that things have become too much.

Which, she explains, means I’m a sponge.

She sums up a section of the book The Highly Intuitive Child: A Guide to Understanding and Parenting Unusually Sensitive and Empathic Children, explaining the difference between ducks and sponges. Ducks allow “other people’s emotions roll right off them, like water off a duck’s back. These people may be warm, caring, and sensitive, but they still have no trouble distinguishing other people’s emotions from their own.”

Their anger doesn’t have to be your anger. Their frustration doesn’t have to be your frustration. They can think and feel what they need to think and feel, but you don’t have to carry their feelings with you.

Sponges absorb other people’s emotions. They “soak up other people’s feelings, experiencing them as their own, and physically registering those emotions. This isn’t a choice; it happens automatically.”

And then she gives an example which I recognize in myself.

There are strategies in the book for navigating sponge-hood, which, like Modern Mrs. Darcy, I didn’t even realize was something I did until I read her post and narrowed my eyes thinking, “This feels very familiar.”

So are you a duck or a sponge?