Feed your humour, stay safe but mentally engaged

Message from a male reader: I’m 71 and still sleep with a beautiful woman!

That wise man is counting his blessings in a time of worry.

A laugh from a friend: A photo of a cocktail called a “Quarantini.” That’s humour amid crisis.

Medical science says that laughter produces chemicals in the body that relieve stress and enhance physical and mental health.

So let’s have more of it. If you’re self-quarantined at home, sharing jokes and some amusing videos online is “good for you.”

The same goes for being helpful. Just circulating a list of stores that will deliver groceries or pharmacy needs puts some people’s anxieties at ease.

Despite our rapidly changing lifestyles due to COVID-19, there’s much to do:

Anything positive, anything that can help someone.

Keeping yourself safe is essential, but it doesn’t mean ignoring all others.

If you have an idea that can work in your community, send it out online. Ignore the naysayers.

So, here I am, writing well before the date you are reading this, self-quarantined Day 1 of 14, and writing a little about myself.

Like many people these past two decades, I can work from anywhere on my laptop. In recent years, my husband and I found that the answer to weeks of cold, grey winters was to rent a small apartment near sand and sea for a while.

Now we’re back home.

Day 1 of staying isolated indoors has meant wiping down any supplies family members had helped accumulate ahead for us, plus sanitizing and laundering everything we brought back.

But, joyfully, it’s afforded the chance to Face Time at some length with our younger relatives in different cities, some already “going to school” remotely.

A fitness trainer in my area has started teaching classes and individuals on Zoom.

Another friend has always communicated with her university-age relatives through online Scrabble and Words With Friends.

If all this sounds Pollyanna-like about what’s actually a historic pandemic, my advice to Self and to you is to get through it as best we can for as long as we must.

I urge you all to try to do the same. And stay connected.

Count your blessings, feed your humour and stay safe but mentally engaged with those you know and trust.

Read what inspires you, stay informed, but don’t overdose on bad-news scenarios. Hope is a necessary ingredient for a healthy life and mind.

We all want the goal of survival to include coming out of all this without being spiritually destroyed.

Q: I’m a single woman, 46, who was invited to dinner at a casual friend’s house over three weeks ago. It was just before we were advised to not be in groups of more than five people. I went and was surprised that the host, who’d mentioned inviting eight people over, had invited 14!

Included was a woman I hadn’t met previously, who kept talking closely to my face and touching my arm. I was so uncomfortable that I made up an excuse to have to leave early. I tell the host that he was much too casual about how his gathering could possibly harm his guests through spreading of the coronavirus? Still Upset

A: The rules are spelled out clearly now. We ignore them not only at our own peril but by risking others’ lives.

Only those who are truly selfish and ignorant will do as they please, which will prompt even stricter surveillance and heftier fines.

Your “self-protection” is no longer only up to you, since it can affect everyone else in your home or whom you meet over the days following.

Ellie’s tip of the day

Getting through social isolation requires finding online resources for human connection, creativity, fitness and needed help.