Love In the Time of Corona

"Oh, dream maker, you heart breaker

 Wherever you're going, I'm going your way"

                               ---- Moon River, Mancini/Mercer

The scariest part of life is not knowing the future. I am convinced of this, and it's one of the reasons we tend to look back on things more fondly than is sometimes deserved. I'll remember the good aspects of a job, for instance, and then have to shake-off the rose-colored glasses for a moment and remind myself how miserable I was during that time. Of course, experiences aren't always straight-up good or bad -- there's things to appreciate amidst the parts we wish hadn't existed. But, not knowing what comes next can often preclude a sense of calm from certain situations.

I've been thinking about the aforementioned line-of-thought during these precarious times of sheltering-in-place during the global COVID-19 pandemic. Life has altered to such an extent, in such a relatively brief period, that I'm not sure our human brains have been fully able to adjust. We understand the situation, but there's still a sense of shock. It's worrisome, stressful, anxiety-inducing, and sometimes just plain frustrating and annoying. It is a lot of things, and that can be difficult for us to handle.

A recent article startled me with the clarity of its headline, and how it provided a name for what I'd been feeling of late: grief. There is a finality that can accompany grief. When someone we love dies, we grieve perhaps for the pain they may have endured during the dying process, or that they will no longer get to experience the gift of living or, if we're being completely honest, the selfishness of no longer having them around. I think I feel that way a bit about the way of life so many of us have enjoyed up until now, and its newly-found fragility.

We're told, of course, that this current status of closures, quarantine, isolation and spreading of a sickness we have no immunity for is a temporary situation. We will see the shops, schools, restaurants and movie theaters re-open at some point, those of us who work at offices will go back to work there, people whose jobs were lost will be able to find employment, we should once again be able to physically interact with friends and family, and we just might see toilet paper on supermarket shelves again. Things will reset resume. Maybe.

There's a part of me that's gun-shy about all of that, however. The rug's been pulled out from under us with this. I'm a person who loses trust easily, though up until now it's always been with people. When fate does it to you, well, that's a little more difficult to cope with. We don't have a crystal ball, we can't know the future, and that's the part that has always been the dagger of the mind. That is the achilles heel of my confidence, the weakness of my hope. Hopefully, a year or so from now, hindsight will allow us to look back at this time with possibly a better point of view, but it's difficult to do that now.

Of course, there's a different perspective to what's happening at the moment. It's a dark method of cold, objective hope, in that humanity has thus survived things like the Bubonic plague, the Holocaust, world wars, slavery, the 1918 influenza pandemic, natural disasters, and a whole host of other calamities. Not all of us, of course -- that is the terrible toll left by the these things. Not everyone makes it through. We may lose people we know and love. Perhaps, in this current era, we will lose ourselves (including yours truly)? But, ultimately, humanity will survive. We've made it through a lot, and we'll make it through this.

One thing is nearly certain: If I stay healthy and survive this pandemic, I'm going to be much more appreciative of things. And people. My god, there are people I just want to be with and hug 'til there's no tomorrow. I want to go to a restaurant, sit down, and enjoy a meal there. I'll hopefully be much more forgiving of the food, or of the staff if they're having a bad day. I'm going to travel and experience more places I've never been to, and revisit some old favorites. I'll go to the movies, and to concerts, art museums, and social gatherings. Being around a lot of people often gives me anxiety, but I'm gonna embrace every minute of that anxiety once this is over.

See you soon, hopefully.