These are deeply unsettling times.  We’re in the midst of a public health crisis and yet for most of us the threat is still statistically remote.  Viruses are invisible and yet their reality is omnipresent and terrifying.  So many normal life activities have simply stopped, yet the lack of an end point is perhaps the most stressful aspect of all.

It is as if we were suddenly dropped into a world that is similar to the one we’ve always known, yet different in some bizarre ways that we don’t know how to parse.

So we tell each other to stay safe, to practice social distancing, and to wash our hands, a strange mixture of the familiar and the new.  But how should we best communicate with one another in this fearful new order of things?

In times like this – and the only precedent is that we are in unknown territory – we need to go back to the basic tenets of good communications.  Those haven’t changed, and they can offer us some guidance for these terrifying times.

We owe each other honesty and authenticity.  I shouldn’t have to say that, but in times of great fear, it’s tempting to let go of the fundamental guideposts along the way and get way, way off track.  So instead, stick to what you know to be true and what you know is real for your best self.  Your best self, not your most terrified self.

We owe each other kindness and patience.  If you want to come through this weird time with your soul intact, you need to be able to look back and know that you treated your fellow human beings with patience and – especially – kindness.  This virus is an equal-opportunity equalizer, and you will be tested by your ability to shed your prejudices, fears, and bad old habits to see if you can rise to the occasion and bring out the best in yourself and the people around you.

Most of all, we owe each other understanding.  If this virus is to have one good effect amidst all the tragedies, it might be that we woke up to the ancient truth that our ancestors understood so well and that we seemed to have forgotten:  we are indeed all in this together.  Somewhere, right now, a health care worker is choosing which patient to put on the one ventilator left.  That’s a choice no one should ever have to make.  Yet, hundreds, perhaps thousands of those kinds of decisions are now being made every hour around the world.  This virus is not like the flu – it is causing widespread outbreaks of viral pneumonia, a deadly killer.  We have been caught short with ventilators.  Many people are going to die who just needed a machine widely available around the world in any well-equipped hospital.  But because we failed, as humans, to imagine that a pandemic might actually happen, and what might be its effects, some of us are now forced to make decisions nothing can equip us to make.  Life in extremis threatens our core values and tests our ability to adhere to the values that make us human.  It’s time for forgiveness, for imagination, for sacrifice, for understanding.  As Ben Franklin said, also in a time of great change, “we must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we will all hang separately.”