As the abundance of daily life gets gradually stripped away, and as we each face an indeterminate sentence of solitary (or near solitary) confinement, we are also given an opportunity to redefine our lives and how we live them. It is not impossible that the current worldwide health crisis, coupled with the even more devastating necessary measures taken to address this crisis, is not a comma separating items in a series, but a period (or at least a semicolon) marking the end of something and the beginning of something related, but not the same.
Of course, it is not the first time that life has reset. Looking back through history, we can find multiple nexus points where nature (or human beings) stepped in to the flow of “normal” life and redefined the terms. From the obvious comparisons of plagues and other epi- (and pan-) demics to world wars and accompanying financial collapses to a pesky meteor hitting the planet and cooling everything down for a while, the line of history has been anything but straight. However, viewing each of these through our vantage point, we can only see the through line, not how it looked from within the pivot.
Even the term normal life is a misnomer. We all have crisis moments that change the current course and send us in different directions. Many of these are shared, though experienced separately, such as deaths of parents, divorce, loss of job, etc. But we seldom experience such a shift so collectively and simultaneously. With each passing day, with each additional measure, and with the devastation of the disease itself, our world is changing in ways that we will grapple with for years and that we may not understand in our lifetime.
Of course, none of this happens outside of context as well. One could argue that our path to this crisis has been paved by decisions made long before Corona marched on to the scene. We have been living in a toxic environment without a toxic virus (my friend William hates the current use of the word toxic, but I hope you will excuse this one). An image I have of this time is Nature putting us all into timeout, telling us to think about what we’ve been doing. Our frustration and anger and hopelessness have worn away at our collective immune systems, making us more susceptible to whatever comes our way, be it virus or despair, and it will take more than a vaccine to get us through.
Very few will be unscathed by this, and the millions of little stories will merge into a collective narrative of pain, loss, struggle, courage, and hope. My way of coping with an insane world has always been to write, so I have decided to take this opportunity to offer a special “non Christmas” version of the blog. In the coming indeterminate number of days of captivity, I will write a daily post about some aspect of the world changing around us, both my own experiences and my limited analysis of broader trends. Though I don’t suspect that I can be profound (or even original), I want to face what is coming with thoughtfulness and care. We have very little control or choice over what comes next; however, we are not defined by our times but by our reaction to them.
Take care of each other.
Thanks.