If there is peace in your mind, you will find peace with everybody.

My Whole Foods market is a maze these days.  

In order to keep all of us from actually bumping into one another and to maintain the required social distance, there are physical barriers where there were once aisles. There walls of soda and beer and chocolate bars and haphazardly stocked HydroFlasks meant to be visual cues that send you this way and that as if we're all experimental rats searching for the proverbial cheese. 

The cheese I wanted today was my Tulsi Tea.  If it were not for the chocolate wall in my way, I would have found it immediately, but no, I was not allowed to go that way and so instead had to go up and down a bunch of other aisles to retrieve it.  Whole Foods is the only store in my area that sells this tea, otherwise I probably wouldn't don my mask to make the effort. 

I used my rat instincts to find my way back to the check-out.  The kind woman who was working the till shared that she also loved this particular tea.  Through our masks we shared war stories of the pandemic and how the tea was actually what was getting us through it.  My muffled voice saying, "It has kept the demon dreams at bay..."  and then she replied, "Oh, yes.  Exactly.  I'm so glad that I'm not the only one." 

No.  I do not think a single one of us is the only one.  Not at all.