Our Dickensian Moment

I debuted a video of me reading William Wordsworth on Wordplay’s Facebook page earlier tonight, and I honestly don’t see how you can expect any more of me, but here I am writing my blog post—because it is Wednesday. This is such a time of contrasts, isn’t it? One minute I’m totally frustrated with trying to accomplish a formerly simple task and the next minute I’m almost crying because I’m laughing so hard at something someone else posted re: WFH Fashion or How to Up Your Baking Game Under Self-Quarantine.

It was wild at work this week, with people stampeding through the store, refusing to respect the six-feet rule, and continuing to expect things to function as normal in the midst of a world-wide crisis. Everybody handles things differently, and I understand that, but I have talked to several people who somehow seemed to be in denial that anything unusual was taking place. One very nice woman seemed quite reasonable except for the fact that she just wasn’t accepting the fact that lockdowns in some places mean that some problems can’t be easily solved right now. I had several conversations in which I had the sense that people were hanging on to an everyday reality that no longer exists.

At the same time, I’m charmed by the humor and ingenuity displayed by everyday people trying to make the best of things and cope with challenging circumstances. I’m still wondering what will happen to those of modest means who aren’t really equipped for riding out a tsunami like this one. I’m assuming that good will and understanding from everyone involved will carry the day, and in most cases, this is probably true, but it’s difficult to imagine that all losses will be made good. How could they be? Some things really can’t be undone or redone, and there really are months (and years) of your life that you can never get back, no matter how much you want to. That’s something especially difficult for young people, who haven’t had a lot of experience with life upheavals, to understand.

The surreal is now normal, something I’m sure few of us anticipated could happen almost overnight. You just don’t expect the new normal to radically change from one day to the next. One day, I watched from a quiet corner of the grocery store as at least 20 people descended on the produce department at one time; a couple of days later, I was told I couldn’t stand in the completely empty section of the store that formerly housed the cafe because it was “closed” (though no one was within 25 feet of me or actually even in the section at all). All of the parks in town are closed except for one, which has inexplicably remained open. Last week, they were so packed with people that I was afraid to get out of my car, and now even the parking lots are blocked off, so obviously someone figured out the Petri dish potential of the walking paths—no social distancing with hundreds of people walking at the same time.

I’ve been noticing moments of splendor in the midst of chaos, something I’ve become very adept at doing. I’m often in my car and unable to stop when I notice something springlike and beautiful; if this were not the case, I would take even more pictures. I’ve noticed in the past that photographs often fail to capture the full effect of what I’m seeing, but maybe I’m getting better at gauging whether something is photographable or not. My sense of what’s important has changed since I stopped working full-time years ago. It sometimes seems to me that I accomplish more by taking a photo of a tree than I did by working an entire eight-hour day at my desk job, courtesy of some algorithm of usefulness that I’ve developed on my own.

Not all of the effects of what’s happening will be bad. I am not one to recommend character-building experiences (feeling that I’ve had more than I will probably be able to benefit from no matter how long I live)—but you certainly can learn a lot of things about yourself when you’re thrown out of your comfort zone. Of course, you already know that, so no need to state the obvious—just remember the old chestnut about tough times not lasting. And the glass being half-full, not half-empty. All those old cliches.

Social Distancing for Extroverts

Hand washing and social distancing: the watchwords of the hour. I’ve been practicing both to the best of my ability, but I can’t help thinking that the latter, while probably necessary, is rather a tragic result of the current situation. I’m naturally an introvert, so spending time alone isn’t nearly as difficult for me as it is for the extroverted majority—and yet even I recognize that humans are social creatures and need other people. Most people can’t even seem to make it at home for more than two or three days during the holidays before they’re ready to bust out of the house, so I’m sure the quarantines are going to be very trying psychologically for many folks.

Of course, there also lessons to be learned on the ways in which trying to take care of each other can be accomplished in unfamiliar ways. I was going through the drive-through at Starbucks today when it occurred to me how many germs were probably on my Starbucks card, which I was getting ready to hand to the barista, so I wiped it off front and back with hand sanitizer. Apparently, that does not keep the card from working, though there might be a limit to how many times you could do that. (It’s too bad you can’t do the same thing to money.) Trying to give people extra personal space at the grocery store and not touching any more surfaces than necessary also requires thinking about things in a new way.

Whether it’s good news or bad news, I don’t know, but the fact is I’m so used to surreal conditions that this crisis is mostly just more of the same for me. I won’t be able to frequent cafes for a while, and the libraries are also closed. I had to scramble to find things I didn’t want to run out of once I realized people were starting to buy things up; I’m living with uncertainty and wondering how long current conditions will hold, just like you are. And yet, it’s exactly the type of thing I’m familiar with, how life can be turned upside down in the blink of an eye. I’m not happy about any of it, and yet in some ways I personally feel less isolated than I did when my own surreal adventure, if you can call it that, began 10 years ago. Now I know other people also know what it feels like to be isolated, anxious, and to some degree helpless, to see things spinning beyond your control.

It may be ironic that I, one of the world’s champion introverts, am so transfixed by the prohibitions on getting close to other people, but it’s that aspect of our current reality that’s really captured my imagination. Entire novels will be written about our current predicament; the one I would write would deal with the tragic aspect of not being to touch other people. It seems like a metaphor for so much more, for some kind of malaise that has perhaps been hidden for a long time but takes its visible shape in the form of a virus. Am I saying we made ourselves sick? It’s not that exactly, but more that there’s a kind of symbolic truth in the virus. How strange that it would have made its appearance at a time when we’re already so divided politically.

We will probably learn a lot of things about ourselves by the time this situation is over. One of the most interesting questions to me is how people will handle this unprecedented opportunity to practice introspection. Whether any profound changes come out of it is anyone’s guess, but the chance to get in dialogue with the Self (in Jungian terms) has never been better.

Don’t Sneeze On Me

I’m currently fighting a cold, and all that hand-washing and hand-wringing over “Are my hands clean enough?” and “Will I catch coronavirus on top of this?” is a bit tiring, I must admit. I am a model hand-washer, but I’ve been hit with an obscure feeling of guilt over having a cold, as if the very sight of me sneezing might be enough to send the populace into a panic and the stock markets tumbling. On top of that, I’m having to stay hydrated to keep a mild cold from turning into a bad one, my hands are dry from all the washing, and my nose is turning a becoming shade of red. Good times!

The coronavirus situation was borne in on me the other night when I went in search of sanitizing wipes. There were none to be had in any of the stores I went to; a Walmart employee told me that when the store does get a shipment, they sell out immediately. In the grocery store this morning, the toilet paper aisle was nearly decimated. When I heard about the strict quarantine taking place in Italy, I was amazed: if Italy is making people stay home, things are getting serious. Officials had been telling people in the beginning that there was little to worry about here in the U.S., and technically I suppose that was true—until the first cases appeared.

It all reminds me a little of a disaster movie in which the global threat of a pandemic starts to unravel the underpinnings of civilization and send the world back to the Dark Ages. No big deal not to be able to find Purell at the grocery store, you say. Oh, that’s just what you think. It starts with Purell and then progresses to milk, bread, antiperspirant, and beer. Then they’ll run out of toothbrushes and clean underwear. People start rioting in the streets, and the thin veneer of modernity gets ripped off like a dirty bandage. It’ll be up to a straggly band of hardy survivors to escape the pestilential cities, where people are fighting over stray boxes of Kleenex and tubes of toothpaste, to set up a new coronavirus-free zone in some Edenic setting that resembles Isla Nublar but hopefully contains no dinosaurs.

Well, I hope our structures, institutions, and resolve to hang onto our hard-won evolutionary gains will keep the coronavirus from spinning us all out of control. We’ve been through it before with the flu and other infectious diseases, and there seems to be little to be done other than following reasonable precautions. I haven’t noticed people behaving much differently here. I won’t be going to any large-scale events in the foreseeable future, but I wasn’t planning to anyway. I’ll be nursing my cold, trying to remember not to touch my face, and hoping the shortage of sanitizing wipes doesn’t last much longer (they are handy things to have, but I wouldn’t fight someone to the death over them). I have no large-scale mythological advice to offer beyond “Wash your hands,” and you already knew that anyway.