Embrace your valor

Volunteering at a mass COVID vaccination site is quite the experience. Six thousand people per day, all in vehicles, every person and car filled with a unique blend of enthusiasm, fear, hesitancy, impatience, and ebullience.

“Hello!” “Is this your first or second dose?” “Any history of serious reactions to vaccines, foods, medications, pets, or anything at all?” “Have you had any other vaccines in the past 14 days?”

As a vaccinator in one of ten car lanes, a clinician charged with performing last minute screenings prior to gently slipping a needle into deltoid muscles large and small, I have learned to ask screening questions while scanning faces, listening for responses that might disqualify someone from receiving the vaccine, staying attentive for tense voices and body language that could foreshadow an anxiety reaction, being alert for signs of defensiveness and watchful for unexpected reactions that my questions, posed through the muffling shield of a KN95 mask, may bring.

It is rewarding work. It is fatiguing. It can be exhilarating. All in the short span of seconds, really. Take a breath. Smile with the eyes. Bring new energy for each vehicle. Observe. Assure that the vaccine is delivered where it is supposed to be. Try not to fumble with a bandaid that often sticks to other things than the skin it is intended for. Remember to acknowledge the sincere expressions of gratitude offered by the majority of car occupants as one vehicle rolls out of the station and the next one rolls in.

So much of our lives are choices. We can, at any moment, decide whether or not to give a vaccine, to receive one, to tell someone about ourselves, to take real interest in another person, to contribute, to trust, to offer our love, to believe that love, and its expression, is meaningful.

Valentine was a fairly common name in past millennia. It meant strength, capacity. In the centuries of the Roman empire, someone called Valentine was a person named in honor of valor. It took courage to live up to the appellation. People died because of that bravery. One of those people, Valentine of Terni, was martyred for it on February 14, in the year 269. A feast day in his honor – St. Valentine’s Day – was formally acknowledged in the year 496. Today, over 1500 years later, we retain our own version of this remembrance, a day filled with an assortment of symbols and expressions of romance, amorous intentions, and fondness. The path from 269 to 2021 has had some interesting turns; along the way, dying for love transformed from a religious to a more secular interpretation. The change, however, is not a loss. What has been retained, despite contemporary manifestations of materialism in the name of intimacy, is the vital expression of interpersonal caring. Of love. It is not easy to decide to love someone, whether that someone be a romantic partner, a family member or friend, or a stranger in need of assistance. Doing so is a choice. Acting on that choice is a display of vulnerability, commitment, and common identity.

Such actions take strength.

I am thinking today about strength, and its sources, because I am reminded this morning, the day prior to another shift of vaccination volunteering, of how weak I so often feel. There are big problems in the world. There are huge challenges in daily life. Sometimes I’d rather plunge my head into the proverbial sand of distraction, of avoidance, rather than turn towards the seemingly tyrannical pleas for assistance, for betterment, that surround us so openly, so persistently, so painfully obviously. Pandemic or not, we do not, as a species, reliably advance common causes of decency, inter-reliance, and global protection. It is, sadly, all too easy for narratives of individualism and personal achievement to occupy our focus and seduce our energies. And it is, unfortunately, part of my own plight that a day giving to others necessitates at least two or three sun cycles of emotional preparation. I worry about my ability to serve, to truly support the needs of each person in each vehicle, to be a part of the whole that understands, fulfills, and enjoys its role.

But that is a choice, is it not? That is my choice. My decision. When I am able to do that, when I can find strength through my convictions, then I can share that capacity with others. And that stoutness can be shared with me. Atoms, bonded together, form molecules, and molecules that combine become compounds. That is “valence”, the essence of everything we physically experience, at a basic biological level. It is the ability of things to bond. And bonding is what we all seek on emotional and spiritual levels as ell. So why do we make both our fundamental desire to connect and our experience of connecting so difficult? Why do we question, fret, and despair when our individual capacity to bond feels insufficient? That is how this design of life is structured. That is the basic drive behind our desire to love, to be loved. We are not separate; we only like to think we are. We are not isolated; we only experience isolation through disruptions of our commitment to connect. We are not energizers; we are simply expressions of universal and cosmic energy.

I can chose to believe that together, you and I, are powerful. We can chose to recognize that separately, you and I, are weak. If we do so, are we not then stronger? When we embrace that strength, are we not then all Valentines?