The past few weeks have been challenging, but also damn inspiring. At EngAGE, our job every day is to provide a sense of community and purpose for the people who live in our communities. At the heart of the current challenge, we are tasked with figuring out how we create community when people are told to stay indoors and apart from one another. As many of the people we serve are elders on a fixed income, to a certain extent our job hasn’t changed that much, it just morphed a bit. Why? Because elders in our communities are often overlooked every day, made to feel invisible, told in many ways that they don’t matter anymore. They are faced with a crisis that has been around long before COVID-19 – the crisis of the loneliness and social isolation that can be as harmful to us as cigarettes.
I have been on numerous calls and videoconferences with our staff, our board and our leadership team in the past couple weeks, talking about what we should do about this thing out there right now. I have been working in this field for decades and I have to admit when first faced with the task of reaching people in “lockdown” and identifying what they need, I felt a sense of overwhelm. But I listen to our staff and I am buoyed by their creativity, their compassion, their “buck stops here” attitude about helping our peeps – and my heart soars.
We have done some very cool things to respond to this crisis and ideas spring from the people I work with every day, all day. We are forming mini task forces at our buildings to create direct pathways of communication with the residents. We have increased access to food, created amazingly cool virtual programs, phone trees, tech training for our elders on how to connect to online programs, and many other creative solutions. We have connected with residents who we have struggled to connect with even before this crisis began, people who are now reaching out and responding in this time of challenge.
I didn’t know you could lead a yoga class on a cell phone. I now know we can have an art show opening virtually. People can sing together, talk to each other, support each other – safely from a distance. Most importantly, we have kept our people aware of the most cutting edge and pertinent information to stay healthy during this time, to flatten the curve of the virus, to help us all avoid spreading disease. And while we are doing that, our amazing staff finds ways to make people feel a part of their community, to smile, to inspire each other, to come together and be better than who we were before this started.
One of my favorite books has always been Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning,” the personal story of the Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist who not only survived the concentration camps, but created the “will to meaning” principle around how we deal with life’s hardships. He believed, as we do at EngAGE, that the most effective way to engage humans in life-changing positive behavior is achieved through the belief that people are primarily driven by a “striving to find a meaning in one’s life,” and that it is this sense of meaning that enables people to overcome painful experiences and have a productive life. Dr. Frankl said, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”
I can’t think of a more important time to discover our “why” to live in order to deal with the “how” of it all – to discover our “meaning.” I hope and believe that one thing we will all walk away with, after this time of COVID is said and done, is that we all have a better and more empathetic understanding of what it means to be isolated from one another. I think people are showing real care and concern for their older neighbors because they realize how isolated they can be. Perhaps we can start to put away our ageist and separatist habits of shrugging off our elders and embrace them as a beautiful part of the tapestry of our community.
I am a music fan of the highest order, a music nerd of the Nth degree. I am a big lover of Spotify as a way to listen to music, as I started making mixtapes when I was not even yet a teenager. The Spotify playlist is a beautiful thing. I have created a collaborative playlist on Spotify called, “Songs of Hope.” The link to it is at the end of this post. Please click on the link, add ONE song that gives you hope, inspires optimism, makes you feel a part of this thing called life. Then listen to it often and be reminded by all of our songs how much we have, how much we each can offer, and all that we can do… together.
Be well, all of you, and I want to thank the people I work with, my friends, my family, my colleagues – the tapestry of my little community. I am grateful, truly.
Tim Carpenter, CEO/Founder, EngAGE
Link to the collaborative playlist, “Songs of Hope.”
You can join Spotify for free or pay a small monthly fee to not hear commercials. When you click on the link, the playlist will come up in Spotify, save the playlist to your library, then search for the hopeful song that you want to add to the list, click on the three dots (…) and click “Add to Playlist” and add to Songs of Hope.
