A time like no other
No year in my life, and likely in most people’s lives, has been or will be as disruptive as 2020, and it’s only a little more than half over.
Friends are reporting pandemic phenomena that include the furnace, refrigerator and water heater all going out at once; or being overcome by comfort spending. Others have had several weird health issues that hit simultaneously.
For me, it was sciatica and now a strange coming and going of vertigo. Meanwhile, my computer limps toward dotage, threatening to die.
Another expense awaits. But it always does.
Working from home from the end of March until mid June, I felt scattered and disconnected, so I returned in person. But after a few weeks in the office, I decided it was too risky to be indoors with 30 or so people. I miss all the other colleagues I haven’t seen for months. I expect that I won’t see them anytime soon. Our camaraderie is now in spirit.
The one thing I know is that we will look back on this time either from a better time when we might even romanticize the shutdown and the sacrifices we made, or
from one even worse.
Millions of Americans have lived with adversity and without sufficient resources all their lives. Most of the rest of us have been spoiled for most of our lives, expecting to keep what we have gotten used to. But that norm is not assured. This recent bumpy ride has seemed momentous. We have no idea how long this ride will last.
There are rays of hope for our future.
COVID-19 and the killing of George Floyd have been grievous, but protests that have invigorated the masses who want — no, demand — a more perfect union spur my optimism that maybe we are on the path toward creating one.
The pandemic’s chaotic effect on the primary elections revealed a glance at what I anticipate to be an even more chaotic assault on the general election, but maybe we can stand up against it and right this ship.
What else does 2020 have in store for us?
We will see, won’t we? Spending so much time at home, I have been seeking literary voices to maintain faith in my fellow humans and inspire me to find the resilience I know is in me. Over the course of a long life, most of us create a big-picture perspective that helps us stay centered.
My courage and resilience have been tested several times, notably when I dealt with cancer and treatments to rid myself of it 16 years ago.
Facing your mortality directly is horrifying, but the bulk of 2004 for me was a slog, not the “courageous battle”that so many obituaries describe as the time between a cancer diagnosis and the death that results.
A slog is what 2020 has been, but what has made it a slog is the effort to prevent getting one specific diagnosis, as if that is the only thing to be afraid of now. We can avoid that scary diagnosis by being hyper-careful, at the cost of isolation, but other threats lurk out there, as they always have.
The year 2020 has been so bizarre and all-encompassing that it takes mental effort to get to that normal center, to realize that the conditions of the world before 2020 are the same conditions now and will likely be the same conditions in the future, unless we have the will as a society to improve what needs to be improved.
Thomas Wolfe, the author of “Look Homeward, Angel” and “You Can’t Go Home Again,” wrote poetry, too. I found this poem of his appropriate for this time. It also is appropriate for any time.
“Stranger Than a Dream”
And time still passing ... passing like a leaf...
Time passing, fading like a flower...
Time passing like a river flowing...
Time passing ... and remembered suddenly,
Like the forgotten hoof and wheel ...
Time passing as men pass
Who never will come back again ...
And leaving us, Great God,
With only this ... Knowing that this earth, this time, this life,
Are stranger than a dream.”