Throughout David Brooks’s TED Talk, “The Lies Our Culture Tells Us About What Matters – and a Better Way to Live,” he speaks about finding what really matters in life, and that what we’ve been taught that matters isn’t really what should matter.

Looking back on the last few days, Brooks is completely right. 

For many seniors across the country, a lot has changed in the last week that has in some sense dramatically altered our lives. On Monday, March 16, 2020 the University of Tennessee community found out that all our classes would remain online and that graduation was cancelled along with all other campus events.

Most of us knew that that would be a possibility leaving for spring break, but it still hurt.

It still hurt that we didn’t get to say proper goodbyes to many of our friends and classmates or if we did say goodbye it came too soon. Many of us didn’t realize we would be having our last moments: Senior athletes didn’t know they would play their last game, senior actors and actresses had their last show cancelled, senior artists won’t be having their last presentations. 

For me, as the Editor-in-Chief of the Daily Beacon, I may have just produced my last paper without knowing it last week or that when I walked out the door on Friday that I had just spent my last day in the office with team members actually present. 

We are all suffering this sudden change in lives we thought we had more time to live and a little more time before saying goodbye to.

But, while we may be suffering, Brooks’s speech had a point that for us, this is a valley we have to climb out of.

“Suffering’s great power is that it’s an interruption of life,” Brooks said. “It reminds you you’re not the person you thought you were.” 

While we were all defined by our different roles within the university life, we are all finding different strengths within us now to continue.

I may not be able to physically see my staff just hanging in the office or may not be able to produce a physical paper for the rest of this semester, but I am still a leader. I still have a team who looks up to me for guidance. I have had to put my own feelings of disappointment aside to step up and be there for my staff in this time of uncertainty for them.

Brooks’s point about rediscovering yourself in the wildness and being stuck in that valley is what we are experiencing now. Although it may take a bit, we will pull ourselves out of the valley and if we don’t then someone else could.

Brooks further mentions the Weave, a group of individuals who form relationships and put those first, and how each of us can choose to be like the weavers.

“They demand that you behave in a way where you’re showing up all the way,” Brooks said. “And they teach you a new way to live, which is the cure for all the ills of our culture which is a way of direct — really putting relationship first, not just as a word, but as a reality.”

This is our moment to become a weaver. This is our time to step up for those around us who are in those valleys struggling to make sense of it all during all the coronavirus concerns. This is our time as Chancellor Donde Plowman said in her email yesterday, to show the nation what it means to be a Volunteer. 

While our lives may have been unrooted, our senior moments taken away and we have to find a new norm, this is our moment to redefine our values and be a true Volunteer through helping our communities fill those holes that have been made. 

What Brooks said makes sense, and I think that we can all become weavers in this moment in history so when we look back, we see that we did make repairs to our society.