Backed into it
No matter how I face each of these strange days, something feels off. On days when I feel creative, lucid, and somewhat in awe of the side effects of this great global pause — this usually happens on weekends when I ignore the news — I also feel a tinge of guilt. Guilt that I should be fixating on death counts, government failings, and wealth disparities instead of reading about ancient Indian breathing techniques or obsessing over the scent of wisteria on my walks.
And then, on the days when I feel despondent, low, and depressed about, well, everything, I feel that I’m not allowed to feel that way because of all the things I do have. Among those: health, an amazingly supportive family, a job, food. The fact that so many people don’t have those things causes another layer of grief.
I spend many days in this seesaw of feeling: There is the grief for all that we’ve lost and will lose, and there is the hope that this incredible, levelling event will bring about change in what was a very, very broken world before this. There is the suffering, and there is the hope, and at any given moment the one I’m thinking about feels like the wrong one.
It’s hard to get through a day right now without hearing someone say something like “when this is all over,” or “when things go back to normal.” But when I do manage to feel a faint sense of hope, it is not that things will return to normal. The best phrasing I’ve found is this: “Everyone wants to know when this will end. That’s not the right question. The right question is: How do we continue?”
I’ve been thinking a lot about how I will continue, and the changes that I want to make in my own life — so many! watch out! — as I think a lot of people have. But thinking practically about the way the world can and needs to change feels so fuzzy, and just out of reach for me. I spend my walks trying to imagine it, to draw lines around it. I hear or read the words of Naomi Klein and Rebecca Solnit and my pace quickens: Yes, this is it! And then I open my laptop and scroll through Twitter and it’s gone. Alas, I keep trying.
I’m aware of the discourse that seems to suggest that if you’re finding this time generative or spiritually productive, if you’re inspired by a world where pollution is dramatically reduced and neighbours are helping one another for the first time, then you must be a privileged middle class person who can only feel such things because you have a garden and a salary. That might be true. But I haven’t heard anyone suggest a viable alternative. Is it to wallow in our misery, not daring to imagine how the world or ourselves might be different afterwards, lest we sound like a privileged snowflake? I think I’ll risk being the target of someone’s ire on Twitter if that’s the case.
The thing is, even though collectively traumatic events have historically led to societally progressive changes — see: The New Deal, the NHS, the European welfare state etc — there’s no guarantee any great change will come of this. We have to actively make sure that it does. That invitation feels incredibly urgent for me now in a practical way, but I still think it has to start with a kind of excavation of our inner worlds. As the meditation teacher and psychologist Tara Brach (whose work I was recently introduced to) put it:
“In a way we’ve been training for this. Each of us in our own ways, we’ve been training how to open more in our personal lives to the joys and the sorrows, to the fears, to the losses with an awake heart ... Right at this juncture in time, if you’re intentional [about] how you want to move through this, the suffering that arises can turn you towards your deepest resources. We kind of get backed into it. Into our bravery, into our wisdom, and our love.”
The full talk is worth a listen, but Brach goes onto discuss the role that fear plays in this pandemic, and that rather than something to immediately try to get rid of when it arises within us, we should examine its usefulness: “In many ways in some parts of the world, and with some of us I’d say the United States, we haven’t been awake and scared enough to do what we needed to do to prevent as much loss as what’s coming. Fear is an intelligent part of us.”
I take this to mean: We actually have to be afraid of things going back to normal. Scared in a way many of us weren’t before.
I wrote in this newsletter eight months ago about a deep sense I’ve long had that the way we were living wasn’t going to last. Before the virus, I would sometimes spend days in a kind of contemplative grief, sad about our way of life ending due to climate change and wondering what role I would play in creating the world we need next. I just didn’t know that the transition would come so soon.
And yet here we are. Maybe the way to hold both the grief and the hope at once is to ask: What is your suffering drawing out of you? How will it help create the next world that we need? Finding the answer is indeed urgent, but at least we’ve got time on our hands.
Things I wrote:
I wrote about whether Chinese travelers be willing to come back to America; the symbolism of the New York Times Travel section being put on pause; tourism boards going broke; and of course, cruise lines behaving badly and selling stakes to the Saudis (naturally).
I wrote a couple freelance pieces this month, one about a reassuring if brutal mantra for those suffering with insomnia and another about extroversion vs introversion in lockdown.
Things that have nothing to do with the coronavirus:
I’ve never been into audiobooks before, but now that all my podcasts are gripped by the pandemic, I needed alternatives for the days when I just can’t bear any more news. Two that I've really enjoyed are: “Maybe You Should Talk to Someone,” by therapist and journalist Lori Gottlieb and Jessica Simpson’s (yes, that Jessica Simpson) memoir Open Book, which is just so honest and edifying and delightful to hear read in her Texas drawl. (Don’t just take my word for it.)
Glennon Doyle in conversation with Brene Brown. I also loved her book Untamed.
Rachel Cusk’s trilogy of autofiction, which I’m very late to the party on but very glad I’ve finally arrived.
This On Being interview with Irish poet and mystic John O’Donohue in 2007, right before he died, will never not be relevant.
I’ve been horrified to watch everyone watching Tiger King as if it’s some zany lockdown entertainment choice. Here’s why. (As a bonus, here’s something I wrote last year about the problem with thinking of exotic animals as entertainment, which features one of the criminals in Tiger King.)
On why chronic pain might have nothing to do with your spine or past injury and everything to do with your brain. I’m so fascinated by this idea.
Have you watched Stanley Tucci make a cocktail yet? You’re welcome.
Virus-related content that I found interesting/useful/thought provoking
This really cleared up the whole “Should I wear a mask and if so, which one?” question. (P.S. this explains why we’re all so fucking confused about masks)
Moving away from America ~10 years ago killed the idea of American exceptionalism for me pretty quick. Watching others reach the same conclusion is no less hard.
Thank the lord for Alain de Botton and his brutal stoicism, in which I find great optimism right now.
Arundhati Roy on the pandemic as a portal (warning this is not for the faint of heart).
On examining your relationship attachment style during a pandemic.
If you would like to focus your virus-related media consumption to filter out some of the noise, I would suggest following the bylines of Donald G McNeil Jr. and Ed Yong.
Two places I’m donating money to right now:
North London Action for the Homeless is serving socially-distanced takeaways for vulnerable and homeless people in London, and supporting people who feel particularly isolated during this time. They do great work!
The aforementioned Glennon Doyle’s Together Rising, which gives cash donations to women in crisis.
Word Soup:
“Today I'm flying low and I'm not saying a word. I'm letting all the voodoos of ambition sleep. The world goes on as it must, the bees in the garden rumbling a little, the fish leaping, the gnats getting eaten. And so forth. But I'm taking the day off. Quiet as a feather. I hardly move though really I'm traveling a terrific distance. Stillness. One of the doors into the temple.” —Mary Oliver
“We think that the point is to pass the test or overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: Room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” —Pema Chödrön