This tension between what actually is and what I want it to be has been on my mind a lot lately. Besides counting stones in the park. Or pigeons. If two weeks ago, the energy that was pumping through my veins and shooting out of my fingertips was so chaotic I could have combusted and come back as the emoji with an exploding head only to combust again. Last week was, as a direct reaction to the previous week, the precise opposite: deliberately psychologically slower, then this week, I think I am settling, or have settled, into an adjusted state of reality that defines me right now. And it’s got me feeling contemplative. Is this what happens when you give yourself space to think and permission to let your mind run as it will into the uncharted corners of your thoughts where true and fallacies loiter, waiting for both exposure and destruction?
I called my parents the other day and told them I was anxious. They reminded me of what they said when I was nine years old and off from school for six weeks and complained that I was bored. “There is no such thing as boredom, only lazy minds,” but also, “that any changing of scenery requires adjustment”. What I was feeling was not boredom, it was the lull that bridges a packed school schedule and the benign emptiness of six unplanned weeks. They were right. Within days, the mass of formless time started to feel like it was disappearing and before I could savor the quiet, I was back at school. As we get older, they told me, the bridging lulls stop looking like boredom and start to feel more intense. Like panic. Whether they are right or wrong, it made me think that maybe I am not anxious, so I stopped saying I am anxious and now I am not. I don’t think.
Oh, food and going to the grocery store are still the highlight of my day.
But back to that tension. Last Sunday was a bad day. I was confronted rather directly by my integrity as it told me I am not living up to it. And it wasn’t. The negative voices. The uncertainty. Less alone and more understood by my six-year-old? Doesn’t seem like it when your highlight of the day is to take the garbage downstairs and smoke a cigarette. I don’t feel bad for myself, to be clear. I just think about the nurses and doctors out there at this crucial time. I have been saying this a lot lately. I guess because it sounds to me like I am complaining, but I am really not. Or maybe I am but don’t want to be. The point is, I don’t feel bad for myself. I would if I couldn’t see the disparity between me and what I call my integrity. If I kept on, floating above my body detached, too scared to look in the mirror and thus continually self-distracting but his, I think, is precisely what a slower pace brings.
It is Thursday today. I was supposed to go back to work. I had tears of joy in my eyes when work called me. April 2nd. Regaining normality? Not really. Work has been canceled. I have been informed to stay at home this week, too.
On our walk to the grocery store: A car drove by, it moved rather slowly. I wondered if its driver ( a man) is adjusting to a new pace, too. If he is evaluating this period as a silver lining opportunity to examine the features he has either taken for granted or never cared to lift the lid on because he is internalized these features as Things That Are True, or frankly, Not True. That’s what I am doing. And it is worth mentioning that if we can assess this time as a silver lining opportunity, we are very, very lucky. Imagine the frontline heroes, those begging for their lives, or the lives of their loved ones. What a privilege to be able to think: I feel pretty safe where I am.
One time I listened to someone say that to be an icon, you have to actually do the thing that makes you iconic. It seems this is true for whoever, whatever, however you say you are. Except, for being human. We are all that. We might be far from ourselves these days, but we are all human. As Dr. Seuss would say, “Don’t cry because it is over, smile because it happened.” We have become physically separated but psychically connected.
Will we get through this? Yes, we will.
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