Dinner! Comes the call, to just the three of us. Our version of clanging the hanging triangle, the supper call for a large farm family to come in from the fields. The Walton’s, belly up. But it’s just us, our little family of three, wandering in from different corners of the house. Sheltered in place. Making most of the every-night-at-home dinner.
Again.
Tethering reality to ritual – mealtime, weekend time, school time, work time, bedtime. Mark time. Truth be told, rituals lost their luster in week two. Or the week it snowed again. Or when it rained five days straight. But we anchor out of need. As if to avoid the panicked break to the water’s surface after a near drowning, gasping for air, ‘what day is it? What time is it?’
More rituals begin. “2 Truths and a Lie? or Would You Rather?” She tosses a strawberry in her mouth, waiting for who will decide. My husband will tell three truths, leaving us eye-rolling, ‘that’s not how you play, you have to lie!’ Would You Rather wins. Again. We hand the control over to the daughter. ”Would you rather have insert horrific limb extraction here, OR would you rather eat insert live disease festering swamp reptile here”.
Either way, we die. Long, painful deaths. Hmm, I think out loud. Biting a Brussel Sprout off the end of my fork. That’s a tough one. So goes another night in a string of nights. As we stay close. Managing our small in-real-life world, holding dear our wider untouchable world. Asking, what would we rather?
Everything and nothing.
Pinned by opposites.
A different day, in the wee morning hours in Nepal, walking alone to the outdoor privy, that I first glimpsed the shock of the Himalayas’. We had seen them often while trekking. Afterall, we were in them, but the craggy peaks were distant. Just ideas, not fully realized. But this was the moment when I could, and did, brush my hand on the rock that spiked a castle wall edging the village. As the Titanic must have felt at first sight of the iceberg “dead ahead!”, there they were. Simply, profoundly, surprisingly there. Ghosted by clouds as we trekked the prior day. Invisible until now. Daring passage. I had suffered from blisters that grew until my skin ripped away, leaving open wounds on the balls of my feet. So excruciating the pain, I vomited mid-step. I’ve never had a physical reaction before or since like that. Lying in bed that night, I organized a plan to get back to Kathmandu. Alone. I didn’t want to ruin the experience for the women I was with and believed that I couldn’t go on. But there, alone in the darkness, pressing my palm as though gently to the cheek of someone I loved, I felt something, a need to move forward into the unknown. The Himalayas presented a gift, equal challenge and invitation. Next morning, with feet newly wrapped, and my will turned toward healing, I accepted the invitation.
A different day. Bright, high noon in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, descending thousands of feet down a pass, on two thin tires of my bicycle where brakes were not an option. Neither was a plan. Mount up or walk. Another choice. Another invitation. My hands burned, then numbed from holding the bike steady through the sheer force of speed. Pretending control. So connected was everything in that moment, that turning my head, or my mind for that matter, even slightly might alter the course disastrously. A rush of bad ass joy mixed with a sense of “what could go wrong?”
As with the mountains, this moment presents itself with such scale that the human brain can’t capture it all. The mounting deathtoll, uncertainty, politics, divided citizens, interrupted lives. While also loaded with danger, grandeur, inspiration and lacking all humility. We can only process in bits. Pandemic. An awesome word. With awesome superpowers, unleashing such control over us humans.
We bend the knee.
Swing the pendulum, and you hit the bizarre experience that is the day to day. We walk, take hikes, let the dog and cats outside. Manage work. Zoom friends. Help a homework problem, an after-school online activity. Finish taxes. Fix meals. Read. Laugh. Yell. Play music. We are good roommates. We are horrible roommates. Watch the news. Argue the news. Ignore the news. Work in the yard. Keep a full refrigerator, etc. Spring does what it always does: emerges. In other words, it’s so fucking normal. Stepford normal. A creation of normal. Contrived and lacking all the authenticity and truths we once lived in our day to day chaotic, hurried lives. I don’t want to go back to pre-Covid-19 life. Most people don’t either. We’ve found something in our lives we lost. After a decade+ of being submerged in the corporate world, I have landed wholly in my and my family’s life. There is absolutely something in this that I would rather.
But I am THAT person who misses dancing in a crowd of dirty footed people in the blazing sun at New Orleans Jazz Fest. I am THAT person who misses being with a team of co-workers, leading a team, being at an office that can still have random creative encounters. Who misses climbing over knees “’scus me, pardon me” to get to my seat at live theater. The actors’ ferocity sending a backlit spit-spray across the stage – a visceral, inspiring, beautiful spit-spray. Hurrying during intermission to get at least to the middle of the ladies’ always too long line. Being on a packed flight to somewhere. Riding the NYC subway, the London tube, the DC Metro. Yoga class, spin class, shared sweat. The line at a coffee shop. Road trips with shitty food and shittier toilets. No pun. Planning for the annual extended family vacation, where we all, somehow, live under the same roof – for a week. School events. Community parades. Summer Camp. A niece’s graduation party. A daughter’s 13th birthday.
Ground control? Can you hear me ground control?
I miss contact.
At the same time, I am that person that needs to be alone. Really alone. In my head. Pre-Covid, I could find myself. Think. Write. Create. Uninterrupted. Now I savor my runs to find that space. How can I have so little contact with humans and yet, never be alone? “Take the dog”, she says to me as I head out for a run. I “Would Rather” not. I tried it once, losing my thoughts, moving toward my interior self. That’s when the pup saw a squirrel.
Aloneness has also evaporated.
Our narcissism is under siege.
Would you rather a Pandemic that might make you fairly sick or kill you, or not sick at all, who can say, you will infect people without knowing, likely lose your job, maybe not, could just be furloughed or take a pay cut, but will most certainly create a human correction, maybe, bridge the political divide, yet again, it may make it worse, reduce carbon emissions, actually tip our behavior toward sustaining the planet and each other? Or would you rather continue to live amongst haves and haves’ nots where many will suffer because someone ran the numbers in a spreadsheet, using data points to control like a mighty sword?
Either way you die. (This game is super cynical).
I never had a germ of an idea that my daughter would celebrate turning thirteen with friend’s waving and honking during a beautiful, wonderful, 5-minute drive by. I never imagined my niece would sit in the backyard of her boyfriend’s family home, on a chair, separated from a handful of his family, IRL, while we all watched online, not in IRL, celebrating her college years and achievements. I never imagined such irritation and overuse of “IRL”. I never imagined empty streets of NYC, every time of day. Or former colleagues conducting business from living rooms, dining rooms – work wholly invading their personal space. Or friends lucky to take ‘only’ 80% salary to keep their jobs. Or friends held captive in NY apartments, sick and alone. Or friends with elderly parents with dementia, confused why no one visits. Or parents, locked at home, playing cards alone, waiting. Or friends, who are nurses, exhausted and overwhelmed treating so many unknowns. Or friends who are zombied from an over-Zoomed world. I never imagined the anxiety and exhaustion from masking, gloving-up, temperature check before entering the grocery store. Or stink-eyeing those that aren’t wearing a mask as though they laid a giant fart in the store: we all know you did it.
I never imagined watching news images of body bags loaded into temporary ice trucks when morgues filled to capacity.
Or people, locked in at abusive homes.
Or children, families, humans, locked at the border. Forgotten in this story.
Or so many unemployed, forty million. FORTY million.
Or a nation so completely divided that the entrenchment seems impossible to heal. That people serving the public good would be the mark of conspiracies and degradation and threats. That public figures would be, and transparently so, behind the conspiracies and degradation and threats, and yet, be heralded by so many as god-like.
Now we face this mountain. Rooted in a ME world. We retreated from face to face communication long before Covid-19. We feared ‘the other’, who were also our neighbors, relatives, long before Covid-19. We retreated into our tricked out backyards, basements, barbeques, away from each other, long before Covid-19. Hooked our kids up to video games, lost ourselves in work. Some of us chose to drive our commutes versus public transportation. Some of us chose private jets, the thrill of First Class long gone, let alone crowded commercial flights. We took many small, incremental steps toward separation from us. We portrayed a Millennial generation gathered any-where with friends, always using images of a group together, all on phones. ‘Look at those fools!’, we pointed.
What plague hit us long before Covid-19?
The structurally unsound bricks of social media might have been okay. Matured with time from adolescent form. Misinformation and gaslighting might have been wrangled in with time and sense and pure exhaustion.
But a pandemic came along. A collective, global pandemic. Shaking the foundation of our ME world. A reality TV star President steeped in narcissim came along. Our iPhones, our selfies, our personal-brands have been pulling in crowds on whatever social media du jour. Pulitzer Prize winning journalists have had to compete with “Bobs-Your-Uncle” Instagram or Twitter or whatever not fully formed citizen with wifi screams the loudest. But there are cracks in citizen-journalist/ scientist/politician/actor/hauler/make-up artist/etc. ME is tone-deaf. ME is not reading the room.
ME is not addressing fear. ME is not trustworthy. ME is lonely.
Our belief, our faith, our trust is coming back around to something bigger than ME. We woke up in the middle of the night to take a piss and caught the shock of the pandemic.
No longer ghosted in a cloud of misinformation, it calls us to come calmly toward the unknown. WE must hold hands to succeed.
WE must be more studied, experienced, authentic than ‘I know a guy, and he says…’. Do unto my brother, you do it to me. Our voices. Leaning toward sane, calm voices that work from and for the bridge, not a push to the right or left.
WE are sharing reality, not just personal agency.
Think about what has delivered joy during the Pandemic: Some Good News with John Krasinski, his 20ish minute episodes escalating into pure joy as he shines a light on the collective. A crowd of 150 Broadway Hairspray alums gathered to sing “You Can’t Stop the Beat”. The Legends of the Orioles coming together for Brooks Robinson. Matthew McConaughey calling Bingo for his local nursing home. Cinema Quarantino with Sam Neill. The BBC sportscaster, Andrew Cotter and his dogs Olive and Mabel. The Paris Opera Ballet Dancer’s, performing from home The Dance of the Knights’ from Romeo and Juliet tribute to French essential workers. The Flemings of Ireland learning the Tik Tok dance. Mike Birbiglia’s beautiful, hilarious conversation series “Tip Your Waitstaff”, raising money for out of work comedy club staff. The tours of museums, the digital doors wide-open for us to roam freely. The multitude of free classes from grade school to elite universities. The scores of healthcare workers in a celebratory congo line as a patient triumphantly exits the hospital. And of course, The Queen Mother’s Coronavirus speech: WE will succeed.
These weren’t ME. They are WE.
WE can bey better.
Our capacity to imagine is being called upon.
Fear is hard-wired in us. So is hope.
Post 911, I interviewed many people. Fear built the American housing bubble. Terrorists, pulling off high concept/low technology crimes (remember box cutters??). We raced to lockdown. We needed to own, not rent. Control. We bought homes, made home theaters, birthed the gaming industry to hold our children inside where it was safe. We built outrageous backyards with manicured lawns, organized garages with matching containers. Control. We birthed an OCD nation. We bought and accumulated a mountain of stuff, we needed storage units for all the stuff. We watched Hoarders, pointing our fingers, “look at them, they are crazy”. Home was sanctuary. Home was our protected space. Home was a sense of control. And that blew up too.
During the Great Recession, I interviewed many people. Angry, scared people, who turned to hope. And it worked. We created jobs. Silicon Valley took center stage. We steered away from the rocks we crashed into. People did better. They faced the unknown, and headed to the ladder to climb out of the hole we had plunged in. But not enough people made it to the ladder. They weren’t just stuck, they fell further and further behind, as wealth organized around a few.
Post-2016 US election, I interviewed many people. The election was not a surprise. Fear jumped back in the driver seat, manifesting irrational resistance. A group of people felt left out, that jobs had been ‘taken from them’, children moved on because of that. “You took my job. You took my kids.”, they said. They felt victim to a world they didn’t recognize. Victim to non-English speaking people who picked up crap jobs and made better lives for themselves. ‘They’ stole the American dream. They were victims, carpet-bombed in shame. And that made it easy to clang the beat of hate.
A chorus rose. Leaders and those in power, turning every screw, stoking fear to accumulate power and control.
There was no room for American ingenuity or invention in these corners. It was go back, take back. Take back what? The world had moved on. They gripped tightly to a perverted idea of the American dream. A right bestowed. Never acknowledging that the dream is earned.
That the dream belongs to the dreamers.
Credible evidence proves that change empowers us. We can calibrate toward a brave future, or we can burrow in. To summit the mountain takes courage. Nostalgia may feed us, but not with the right nutrients.
We can imagine that we can make something great again, live in the past – but this is the absolute: the past is in the past. Let it go. (Yes. Sing.)
To build is the priority, not a quest. To build, to innovate, is no longer a choice. People manifest by doing, creating and from that, being able to care for themselves and their families. It’s that simple. WE have to innovate out of jobs that are not sustainable, that don’t (or should not) exist anymore. WE have to pave a world that is fair, one in which people hold a chance to step up. This is not against billionaires. Have at it. Earn it. But locking people out earning? Believing that we live in scarcity, and someone must lose as you gain? Rigging the system to make your billions? Nope. That’s the ME world of yesterday.
So would you rather: build from fear, hollow out the earth, limit the masses, support a few in power, stunt our existence?
Or would WE rather take this very real and very existential moment, hold endless possibility until our hands are numb, and with bad ass joy, fly down the mountain of unknown?
What if that the feeling of “freefall” IS life? Where there is no collision waiting at the bottom. Bottomless possibility. As hard an idea to hold as the pandemic. But if we could imagine, if we could hold that much possibility, how might we move into it?
An onion has many layers. Peel the first layer, there are ideas. Okay. Simple. We will continue to work from home, alternate office capacity. Fly a little less. Drive a little less. Eat dinner at home more. We will wear our masks to the grocery store, stand in line for temperature checks, put on the gloves. We won’t over-buy toilet paper. Good.
Keep peeling. We will check in on our neighbors. Have a glass of wine with someone at the end of the day. Get to know our kids, our parents, our siblings. We will share honestly. We will listen openly. We will shed stuff and gather friendships. We will make music, dance, art. Good, very good.
Keep peeling. We will hold our memories dear, while avoiding living with nostalgia. As Mary Schmich says about nostalgia, “Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for far more than it’s worth.”
Instead, we will lean in and be deeply excited about the future and its unknown path. Yes!
Keep peeling. We will need less. We will buy what we need, less of what we don’t. We will trust the markets to organize accordingly. We will stop our assault on the planet, with intention. We won’t just slow climate change, we will drink from the rivers, grow where it once was unthinkable, and breathe deeply. Finally.
Keep peeling. We will get to work. We will innovate – education, technology, healthcare, social justice. We won’t just slow racism/sexism/genderism/ageism, we will look it in the face, understand its source, and diffuse it. We will wrap our arms gratefully around diversity.
We will know that what is different makes us whole. As Darwin discovered: diversity is essential to survival.
Keep peeling. We will design for bottomless possibilities. For abundance. For fairness. Give people a chance. Designing for the earth, for the whole, not the few.
Keep peeling. We will above all protect the embers of shimmering curiosity. Our gaze alive, hopeful, embracing possibilities. We will keep ourselves curious through creativity, with our children and for our children.
Keep peeling. WE will heal ourselves from this pandemic.
Because of this pandemic.
It has changed us.
WE will succeed.