I had to make a difficult decision: staying abroad without flights back to the US for an indefinite time. So many what-if questions — fears — ran through my mind. What if I can’t get treated? What if someone in my family gets sick and I’m stuck here?

As fear stirred the worst-case scenarios in my mind, something else began to happen. I felt that flittering, pressing feeling dissolve into expansive calm as I imagined the worst images I’ve seen through all of this: people in Italy being left to die. That could be me, or the person next door to me. Then, I noticed each person in my proximity right now and the what-ifs probably running through their minds: my friend who is apart from her husband with a young baby, a 60-something with underlying issues. Strangely, considering all that fear and suffering didn’t bring more fear. I felt an opening, a place of calm in imagining everyone in the world afraid, hopeful, angry, waiting, sending prayer. We are all in this river together.

I watch the anger and resentment come up in me, too. People hoarding, people “irresponsibly” (yes, a label) going out and not taking precautions, people insisting that they know better. Not that it’s OK, but I feel empathy for that, too, because I also feel fear and confusion, and I can feel how, if I really indulged it and let it drive me, I could behave similarly. It’s easy to be self-righteous to the “they” who are not behaving like we think “they” should. However much I want to critique and condemn and control the “them,” I can’t. We affect each other, even the ones, especially the ones, who refuse to see themselves as part of the public. But what would better impel a person to relent into the river of us — self-righteous, spitting hatred or self-possessed, calm encouragement?

Courage, Encourage: both from the Latin cor, heart. “Valor, quality of mind which enables one to meet danger and trouble without fear.” “To make strong, hearten.” A heart pulses, contracting and expanding. Contract and expand is the movement of life. What I can do now is to be one more drop of 7.8 billion who finds the place of expansion again after fear constricts my spirit inward, and then do it again. At this moment, all of us in the world face a spiritual challenge: choosing awareness or fear. Like my racing questions, fear pulls us in, myopic. Heart, empathy, awareness (of our own hearts in the sea of hearts) expands our view outward. Ironically while most of us are confined in our own small rooms, now is the time to open to expansiveness. To fear and then release, fear and release.

Daily, amidst anxious news and local infection and uncertainty, it’s such a challenge, but it’s the most important practice any of us can do now, for our own health and for our fellow humans. And how do we find that “quality of mind,” that calm? In the “simple and forgotten things” that most of 21st-century life tells us are not that important. For me, it’s cooking nutritious and colorful food each day, being present to the clean of brushing my teeth, noticing the trees rustling, the dog coming to greet me, the birds attending to their early-morning activity unaware of human crisis, reading heartening words, FaceTiming with my nieces who are full of love, writing a small poem — creating something. Heart is in appreciation, creation. We’re often led to think that our small individual activities are selfish or aren’t that important. But especially with our unprecedented global connectedness (the inter-net created in our lifetimes) I’ve never felt more aware of my own responsibility in cultivating an inner, heartened life and contributing to, an expansive, loving global life.