How Are You Holding Up?

“How are you holding up?” May this question, exchanged so frequently over the past two months, stay with us through easier times than this. It is an authentic, compassionate question, rooted in genuine care for whoever you ask it of. Both asking and answering the question requires vulnerability. Too, the question creates space for both darkness and light—allowing that some things can be easy or joyful or blissful or peaceful even while others are hard or painful or frustrating or wrong—whereas the more common question “how are you” tends to encourage—if not demand—lightness. Many of us can recall times that we replied honestly—which is to say, with feelings that weren’t exclusively cheer and positivity—to a casual inquiry of “how are you?” only to receive a reply making it clear that the question wasn’t asked with honesty in mind.

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Conversely, “how are you breaking down?” is a question I’ve been asking of myself this past week, and it’s one that I want to offer here. Ours is a culture that stigmatizes death, decay, and aging, so this question doesn’t come as naturally (or as comfortably) as the former. And yet there is immense value, now and always, in examining the ways we are breaking down. In nature, literal breakdown in the form of chemical decomposition is the process that recycles nutrients back into the earth and provides for new life, making it clear: just as there is no death without life, so is there no life without death. What, in this time, is falling away for you? What defense mechanisms, habits, or ways of being that no longer serve you can be recycled back into the soil, making way for new life?

— Mike Fowler