.SOMETIMES RAW.

Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez is one of my favorite books and movies of all time. If you enjoy a beautifully written love story, read this book. Why? Because you have T.I.M.E. Lots of it. And love is great.

How is your love life these days? Is it like in the Movie Ghost and this particular scene with Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze?

This pandemic is remodeling our society like it is clay spinning on the axis of a pottery wheel. I wonder what it is like to be a therapist/couple counselor these days. The divorce rates are probably rising. Will there be a Corona-Baby-Boom in January 2021? Will therapists be more in demand than usual? How have their routines changed? Or, do you want to kill your husband/wife or partner at this point? Does your husband’s cereal chewing so loudly in the next room bother you that you are thinking about this Misery Scene being Kathy Bates?

If one thing is for certain, it is that during this curious and trying time, love is being both challenged and affirmed. While some relationships have taken a step forward, new couples choose to isolate together, some decided to spend quarantine alone, some couples built and some fell deeply in love, while others have taken a different route. Maybe you find yourself in an inflammatory situation. Maybe you are at the edge of a divorce. Since the lockdown was initiated, divorce rates in China have soared. In the Xian Province alone, the number of requests was so high, they maxed out the number of appointments at government offices. I don’t know the numbers in Austria, Vienna but I know of a couple of friends who are struggling in their relationships as well.

As John Lennon famously said, “Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.” I had plans! We all had so many plans. Then life happened. And continues to happen, albeit in an unrecognizable way. At this point for me, all this isolation has made for very deep and interesting conversations. Sometimes it feels like if people have moved past small talk and right into real talk. And this is what happened to me, too. Somehow, this has made me connect with people more than I did previously.  There is nothing quite like a crisis to make you feel connected and nothing like invisible cells, transferred from person to person, to prove just how interconnected we truly are.

For me, perhaps the biggest show of love has been all the conversations with my friend. They keep me sane. They keep me happy. He keeps me sane. He keeps me happy. As the world changes rapidly inside and out, this much has become clear: in many ways, large and small, love is all around. And I can feel it.

And for those moments when I am stuck cleaning up dishes from the millionth at-home meal or when I am listening to myself cracking open pistachio after pistachio, or wondering when I will see and hug my parents again, there is always a shift in perspective. Because as the memes say, we aren’t stuck inside, we are safe inside. And that isn’t so bad, after all. In the meantime, I just keep cracking those pistachios. #eyeroll

Corona makes me appreciate and love to be on this planet. The earth is a living, breathing thing and I don’t think we have really respected that. Now the earth seems to say: stop, think about what you’ve done and come back with a new plan of action. How many things do we really have to do in a single day? How much do we really need? I bet we’re all rethinking things which will make us stronger. Which maybe make us appreciate or love each other more? Also, we are debunking the myth that real work happens in an office or at business meetings.

It is amazing how, a couple of weeks ago, I was concerned about things like buying a more comfortable reading chair. This seems both hilariously naïve and also quite prescient considering the amount of time I now spend in this chair. I always enjoyed being home, and am actually oddly suited to this current situation. It is really not so bad. Just some days. I am not alone after all. Otherwise, I have been thinking about health, togetherness, and maintaining stability. And love. With someone who likes Love in the Time of Cholera as much as I do.

The other day, my friend and I had a 10-minute conversation about food. I mean we talked about our thoughts and feelings for hours and hours before, and the state of the world, or our experience orbiting around each other in close quarters like planetary moons for the past two weeks. We talked about life. Philosophy. And we are good at it. We are good at talking. Our conversation sparked after we came home with bags of grocery store products. Stupid quarantine.

When quarantine initially began, I sat on my kitchen floor for a little over a week, sad but surrounded by more nutrient-dense food options such as lentils, chickpea pasta, raw cashews, kale chips, and these canned Austrian beans: Käferbohnen. I prioritize consuming the latter while dutifully resembling something like a normal, healthy routine. These days, I spent hours plotting how to make everything look and feel the same and hours wondering why my anxiety seems to worsen some days and gets better on others with each measure of supposed self-care such as:

Wake up whenever I feel like it.

Get dressed in a presentable ensemble.

Make coffee for myself (I don’t eat breakfast) and breakfast for my son.

Write and read.

Exercise.

Take a shower.

Eat a well-rounded lunch with protein, vegetables, fats and carbohydrates.

Go outside with my son and play basketball. For hours. And hours.

Light dinner. Creamy Ginger Carrot Soup. Salad.

Read or/and watch something with my son.

More writing/reading/watching.

Sleep and repeat.

Then one evening, after a particular manic day of regimented activity, I was standing in front of my kitchen counter, contemplating the responsibilities of an impending mealtime. I attempted to hype myself up about the prospect of drizzling salmon with herbs and olive oil and baking it in the pan for 10 minutes while adding some fries for my son. Then sautéeing some fresh spinach in a skillet while heating up leftover rice in a pot….. when the box of my son’s chocolate cereal caught my eye. I took it down from the shelf, opened it up, and poured some into a bowl. I topped it to the brim with coconut milk (we don’t drink milk), carried it to the table, and we started eating. It tasted like 1994. It tasted like my mom put it in front of my siblings and I on a Sunday evening after taking a bath when we were kids. It tasted way better than salmon, spinach, and rice.

Of course, we were hungry again after (just carbs), so I fried two eggs sunny-side up and we ate it with avocado slices, and the sautéed spinach. After we ate we felt good. Fulfilled. Satisfied. I sat back in my chair at my desk after and taught about a quote I had once loved but had not thought about in years, from the first season of Modern Family, spoken with comedic seriousness by the uptight Uncle Mitchell: “I am loose. I am fun. Remember breakfast for dinner last week? My idea.”

I am a Certified (Holistic) Nutritionist Practitioner (CNP) and will be the first to admit that pouring chocolate cereal into a bowl instead of eating salmon with spinach hardly constitutes “living on the edge”, but the tiny thrill I go out of it was enough to make me pay attention. Over the next few days, it dawned on me that, despite all the advice I have heard about the importance of adhering to the habits that buffered my pre-quarantine life-a “normal” routine does not necessarily lend itself to a completely abnormal situation. In fact, for me at least, it was a bit like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole: frustrating at best, damaging at worst.

I still see the value in routine. Routine keeps me and my son sane. I am just open to rethinking what the concept of routine looks like right now. Maybe it looks like salmon, maybe it looks like cereal. Maybe it looks like watching Netflix at 11 am. Maybe it looks like trying to start the first chapter of a book I have always wanted to write at 12 pm. Maybe it looks like lying on the floor in my living room and closing my eyes for a few minutes after my daily online Yoga practice at 10 am. I am still figuring it out, holding gently to the things I thought I knew, understanding now that the answers were always meant to evolve. Also, quarantine makes me think and talk about a lot of things. Communicate with one another is key. Especially during those times. And to be honest, even if it is painful. The ego often has to be left behind in order to move on together.

Also, there will always be chocolate cereal in my cupboard.

What are you up to this weekend? We made pizza at home and took a stroll through the park. And, I left my phone at home.

Screen Time: Screen addiction is a very real thing in the Corona pandemic. Everybody is always available, which is good and bad. It is a nice feeling not to wake up with new notifications about the virus for once. Sometimes I enjoy the time-out from digital feeds that make me feel anxious and to stop cycling through my core set of applications i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, email, WordPress. These days, breaking this routine felt strange to me. The urge to constantly know what is going on in people’s lives while focusing on my son’s and mine is a lot of work when nothing else is going on. Taking a break to check in on everybody at all times seems like the right thing to do.

On Reading: I am a big reader and found these days, printed books to be more vibrant than ever. I almost read myself through my mountain of “to-be-read-next-books” and will then order new ones online while supporting local, small bookstores in my neighborhood. My son loves to play by himself so I am able to spend a few hours, even during the day, reading while the world is still broken.

On People-Watching: When I sat in the park yesterday and my son chased his basketball, I watched people. And quickly found that looking worried them. Who is coughing? Is she sneezing? Is he too close to me? To her? To them? People are uncomfortable and scared. So, my son and I played social-distant-soccer and basketball away from everyone for almost one hour and had a great time. We have been watched but smiled at.

Walking Around: We have been for a short walk this morning. It was the first time we were outside in the early morning in days and ambling along the barren streets in Vienna was as surreal. Every corner and every street seems to be re-painted as an empty mirage depicting the erstwhile routine of my life before Corona. Vienna is nothing without its people and the formerly minute, now seeming extraordinary details of our habitual activities. I should have never taken them for granted. Actually, I think this is too harsh. Appreciating what you don’t know you don’t have before you no longer have it is basically the definition of empathy, but it takes time to get there. Often, the time is freckled with adversity. This adversity is subjective, but I want to reiterate, if only for myself, that we are all going through something. Not literally, but the grass of my neighbor might look greener, or the act of acknowledging that theirs has turned to weeds might paralyze me with guilt. But I am someone’s neighbor too, and they are observing my grass. I wish I had grass, though. It’s a cycle, no question, and it can get impede a primal desire to connect, but I am beginning to think it can also be interrupted by the conceptual act of sharing your grass in whatever small way you know it. I talk to my neighbor across the street a lot. He is not naked on his bicycle anymore. Corona changes things.

Mentally Surviving this S***: Or maybe it is better to ask how to make time feel more alive? Or to demarcate it. How do you create the gratifying clear breaks of time that the natural rhythms of daily life, even if that only entails going outside for a short stroll, seem to you? How do you acknowledge whatever festivities were planned when there is no longer a real difference between a weeknight and a weekend night because, at least for me, the material specifics of where I go, what I eat and where I eat, have weirdly blended into themselves. So, my friend and I made Spaghetti Bolognese while dancing Salsa to Carlos Santa during and after cooking. Because, why not? And kinda romantic. I think it was Thursday though who the hell knows anymore when I experienced the familiar desire to race through time in order to get somewhere I want to be again. Remember anticipation? It is funny that as a generation, we have been trying to combat this craving to speed time up, not slow it down. Even though some moments could last forever. Now it is what keeps me buoyed.

All of this is to say that creating a ritual around a thing you love to do then savoring every second of it and sharing it with someone you love, either in physical space, cyberly or by pinpointing yourself as the chosen loved one seems like a worthwhile pursuit right now. For me, it creates a fleeting feeling that makes me think, or lets me pretend, that life is normal. I choose to experience this as a reminder that life will be normal again. It has to be. And if nothing else, today was a good day because we are one day closer than we were yesterday.

Always remember it could be worse: This current situation feels different to everyone. Some feel helpless and anxious. Some are bored. Some are self-quarantined alone, and lonely. Some are realizing that After will be very different from Before. Some just got off their 12th double shift in a row at the hospital and can’t hug their family. Some cannot afford soap. Some are learning how to bake bread. Some are living paycheck to paycheck and the next one will not arrive. Some lost their jobs. Some cannot sleep. Some cannot go to the grocery store because they are at risk. Some cannot afford their rent next month. Some cannot meet with a therapist or lawyer. Some people will lose their business. Some just really need a hug. Some will get divorced this year. Some will have a baby this year or early next year. Some don’t know what they are going to do next. Some are horny. Some won’t see their families for months.

And some are logging off to stay grounded.

This is an interesting article on when the coronavirus social distancing will be over if you would like to read.