A New Normal
I've been resisting the urge to write a blog post about COVID-19. I write about it enough for my job, and I didn't really want it to permeate the fiction bubble I'm currently living in as far as my other writing goes.
But from where I'm hunkered down at home, I've seen too much not to reflect on it. The full hospitals, the shortages of supplies and the utter weirdness of seeing everyone who dares to venture outside hidden behind face masks. It's strange and scary.
What I've seen way more of, though — maybe because I've chosen to look for it, or maybe because it's more prominent than we all realize — is humanity.
I could write a book about everyone on the front line, but my firsthand experience is with the people in quarantine, on the creative ways we've figured out to make things happen despite the circumstances. All of it is so unique that it's a completely different experience, and through it all, so much of it is focused on coming together while we're all isolated.
Classes, concerts and conversations taking place over video conferences, making sure everyone is still included. Visiting one another through windows and behind car doors. Musicians putting all their remote parts together for songs of hope. The realization that every worker is an "essential worker" and it takes all of us for society to work. People singing on balconies, dancing in the front yard, putting signs in their windows, doing whatever they can to reach out to one another.
Somehow, in the midst of crisis, we find ourselves the most human. Between empty streets and vacant buildings, nature is reclaiming itself, reminding us that we're just parts of a much larger whole. And among it all, tucked away alone in our homes, we've learned to connect better than we ever have. We've come together in selfless kindness, in a mutual pursuit of taking care of our own.
Everyone keeps telling me, "Soon things will go back to normal."
I hope not. God forbid we go through all of this and come out on the other side as exactly the same people we were before.
Maybe this is some kind of message from above, reminding humans of our own fallibility. Or maybe it's not. But regardless of how we see the situation, we, as a species, can choose to learn something. We can choose to see what this pandemic has revealed. We can choose to be better — to create a new normal.
I hope that for everything it's cost us, this will be what it takes for us to finally understand what's always been right there: each other.
But from where I'm hunkered down at home, I've seen too much not to reflect on it. The full hospitals, the shortages of supplies and the utter weirdness of seeing everyone who dares to venture outside hidden behind face masks. It's strange and scary.
What I've seen way more of, though — maybe because I've chosen to look for it, or maybe because it's more prominent than we all realize — is humanity.
I could write a book about everyone on the front line, but my firsthand experience is with the people in quarantine, on the creative ways we've figured out to make things happen despite the circumstances. All of it is so unique that it's a completely different experience, and through it all, so much of it is focused on coming together while we're all isolated.
Classes, concerts and conversations taking place over video conferences, making sure everyone is still included. Visiting one another through windows and behind car doors. Musicians putting all their remote parts together for songs of hope. The realization that every worker is an "essential worker" and it takes all of us for society to work. People singing on balconies, dancing in the front yard, putting signs in their windows, doing whatever they can to reach out to one another.
Somehow, in the midst of crisis, we find ourselves the most human. Between empty streets and vacant buildings, nature is reclaiming itself, reminding us that we're just parts of a much larger whole. And among it all, tucked away alone in our homes, we've learned to connect better than we ever have. We've come together in selfless kindness, in a mutual pursuit of taking care of our own.
Everyone keeps telling me, "Soon things will go back to normal."
I hope not. God forbid we go through all of this and come out on the other side as exactly the same people we were before.
Maybe this is some kind of message from above, reminding humans of our own fallibility. Or maybe it's not. But regardless of how we see the situation, we, as a species, can choose to learn something. We can choose to see what this pandemic has revealed. We can choose to be better — to create a new normal.
I hope that for everything it's cost us, this will be what it takes for us to finally understand what's always been right there: each other.