A ten-foot radius with six-foot social distancing?

I don’t know how things are where you’re at, but here in Arizona, we’re still pretty much on restriction as far as the COVID-19 pandemic. Things were closed for all of March and April, then we opened back up (too early) and now things are closing again. Oh, and masks are mandatory.

That means a lot less physical interaction with people. As an introvert this seemed, at first, like a nice thing… but, well, I soon found I was really missing the physical presence of people. Turns out, human beings are creatures of community. We need each other.

“Social Distancing”. Can I just say I am so SO tired of that term? But it’s important. Not going into the medical stuff here, but we’ve got to do our parts! I went to the grocery store for the first time in about two months the other day and they have these big stickers all over the floors:

“Please keep 6 feet apart”

Little footprints of where to stand

“Shop this way” and “Wrong way” on each of the aisles so that people all walk in the same directions.

It’s comical really.

But I was so happy to see other people. (Mind you I wasn’t talking to them or anything, but it had been a long time indoors with everything virtual, so cut me some slack.) The last nine weeks of my sophomore year of college were entirely virtual, and there’s something really difficult about interacting with people over a screen. Don’t get me wrong, I am eternally grateful that we have technology and livestreaming and platforms like Zoom and facetime during this era, but there’s so much you don’t realize about social cues that you pick up on in person that is much different than on a screen.

A few weeks into this new routine, I was wondering, “Well, how does the ten-foot radius thing apply now? I’m not in a classroom, I’m not walking past other students on campus or meeting up with friends, or even encountering people at stores or restaurants.”

A good friend said something really simple but really important:

“Now we’re all the same distance away.”

Yep. All the same distance of internet bandwidth and binary codes. All less than ten feet away too, I suppose. It can seem a lot harder to love someone over a screen when you can just mute your mic or turn away and not answer that call. But even when we were in person it is often hard to truly love those in our closest proximity, the people we run across every day. Now, though it might look different, we still have the same duty of loving those around us.

Don’t worry, my ten-foot radius allows for (and includes) your six-foot social distancing bubble. ♥