Nothing to Fear But…

I once heard a pastor say that you should never make an important decision if you’re hungry, tired, lonely, or scared. I’ve always found that statement to be simple yet profound. It’s also easy enough to view it through the lens of current events.

As human beings, regardless of where we live or what our circumstances, for the past two years, we’ve made almost every daily decision on the basis of fear. After all, a novel virus that is potentially lethal is a worse-case scenario…literally a silent killer. Seemingly overnight, our daily activities, our interactions, nearly everything that we took for granted had to be re-examined as potentially deadly activities. Worse, if they were not deadly for us, they could be deadly for those with whom we were in contact, even incidentally. The volume of what we didn’t know was profound.

There was little information, and fear thrives in a vacuum.

The issue with fear is that it’s contagious. It’s selfish. It overtakes any rational thought. There’s a reason why the first instruction in an emergency is to “remain calm.” When we’re calm, we can examine the situation that confronts us and think through the best course of action. We can make reasoned decisions. When fear is our motivation, we are always on the defensive, always reactionary, always choosing fight or flight. The end goal of every decision is to survive, at the expense of everything else.

As a human race, if the pandemic has taught us anything at all, it’s how well-equipped we are to consider only ourselves and to hate “the other.” People who are scared of dying want to force decisions onto others not because they care about their peers, but because they themselves are afraid to die. If the other makes different decisions, the narrative is twisted to say that it is they who are selfish. We may mask our motivations or do the mental gymnastics to convince ourselves otherwise, but ultimately, this is the case.

There are a lot of reasons for this, and a lot of blame to go around, from profit-seeking pharmaceuticals to news editors tweaking headlines for shock value. I would argue that social media is to blame for much of our current predicament, as well, because it forces us to exist inside of a hive mind in which no deviation from the majority perspective can be tolerated.

Add to this the fact that so many have watched people they care about die from this plague. So, on top of fear driving our decision-making, now there is grief. And rage.

Let me pause to say, I get it. I do. If I thought that death were the end, I would be terrified. Even knowing that it is not, the thought of leaving my children with no father keeps me awake at night. My point here is, though, that we cannot….for the sake of our societies, our very humanity, we cannot…base our decisions, our policies, our interactions, on fear.

We must have courage. True courage, which is not the absence of fear, but rather the fortitude to continue forward despite fear.

We must have love. Love that puts others before ourselves. Imagine how differently these last two years could have gone if our decisions had been made considering the good of our neighbors before ourselves…self-sacrificial decisions based on love of those around us.

At my most pessimistic, I’m not certain that this is even possible in our digital age. I think that social media and the information onslaught has robbed us of the ability to consider others before ourselves, to react to anything in a calm frame of mind, to view the nuances of any situation with which we are confronted.

Even if this is the case, we must…absolutely must…regain these abilities somehow. Because, if we don’t, it won’t be a virus that leads to our collective demise. We will see to that ourselves.

Getting to Know You

Photo of green Monopoly houses. Used under Creative Commons.

The last time that we travelled feels like forever ago, even though it was only March. During our two-week visit to help my parents though a medical procedure, I got into the habit of going for walks in the morning before starting my day. I was working remotely from there, and helping with chores, and the fresh air in between the time when one ended and the other began helped to frame the daily rhythm. I think that it was driven by memory at the time…I enjoyed surveying the back yard of my childhood and thinking through how it has changed through the decades, experiencing that odd virtual reality of the mind when reflections of the way it looked then overlay the way it looks now. The habit of going for a walk I found to be unexpectedly healthy. It was a time for reflection, for prayer, a time to focus before the day’s responsibilities truly took hold.

As we arrived home from that trip, just as the pandemic was gripping the Northeast in earnest and just before life ground to a forced halt, I kept this routine. Unable to go the gym, this also became my exercise and workout. I found that, if I woke just 30 minutes earlier than usual, I could work a healthy walk or run around the neighborhood into my morning, before it would have been time for me to leave for my normal commute (even though my commute was already a thing of memory). So, the habit stays. Karen has began referring to this as my morning and evening “constitutional.”

A funny thing happens when several other people are doing this very thing. You start to pass neighbors on the street regularly. You begin speaking to them. You pause for conversation.

This process is painful, though. I didn’t want it. The change was an interruption to our life, to my plans for the spring and summer. I was frustrated and angry, and resented getting to see these people so regularly. Frequently, though, personal and spiritual growth requires this sort of discomfort.

A few weeks ago, five of us gathered in a driveway while our children rode bikes up and down the street. We talked, learned of each others’ lives, what we do for a living…learned each others’ names. And, while this may sound trivial, it is not, because it is not commonplace in our individualistic society. We pass each other, not knowing or wanting to know each other, until we are all forced to slow down. When we do let each other into our lives, though, even at a surface level, the act quickly reveals itself to be a beautiful thing. We feel safer with our children playing outside. We’re more quickly aware of someone’s needs. We’re disabused of the illusion that any of us are islands, and we realize that we share a distinct place and time, that our lives are connected, a part of each other. A shared humanity is realized.

The pandemic that is injecting chaos into our lives is a horrific thing. There is good, however, if we look deeply. Knowing your neighborhood and those living next to you is a good thing, and a very rare thing. We just had to be made to slow down to realize it.

Image attribution: woodleywonderworks under Creative Commons.

When Doing Something is Just Making Noise

Photo of The Scream, by Edvard Munch. Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons.

There’s a lot of noise in the world. Could we agree on that for a moment? Yes? Good.

I don’t just mean whitenoise, either…the useless, background throbbing that becomes simultaneously non-sensical and remarkably intrusive into our subconscious. Aside from the occasional podcast, I’ve never been overly given to that. I wasn’t the one who would have the television on in my dorm room while I was doing homework. It just didn’t take.

I don’t just mean whitenoise, I mean an overwhelming onslaught of real things that simultaneously demand our attention while leaving us powerless to do anything about them, at least anything substantive. So far, the start to our new decade has been full of these sorts of events. A pandemic, blood in the streets, political farce, the growing uselessness of social media. And, partially because we care about these things (because they impact us even if they’re not knocking on our door directly), and partially because so many people have been shut inside for so long and are going crazy with the need to have something to do…we jump onto a cause. We want to do something, not just let it go by. Haven’t we all been told at some point, after all, to be part of the solution and not the problem?

The issue with this is that, more often than not, these issues are of such a huge, national or global scale, that we really can’t do anything about them. We can’t do anything that would really make a difference, in any case, no matter what the pundits would have you to believe. This isn’t like the family problem that just caused chaos in your living room. There’s generally something that you can do to impact that directly and positively. These are things that have spun up outside of our control. They were never in our control. They exceed our control by definition.

Sometimes, we’re told there are things that we can do to “do our part.” These things range from the practical to the completely useless, from washing your hands to yelling about something on Twitter to draw awareness. Sometimes those things are valid, and more often they are completely devoid of effectiveness. Still, though, we have to do something, right?

This is when the mob mentality begins, and most of our society, having never been educated in the ability to think critically, runs like lemmings off of the cliff in a desire to exert some control, to right a wrong, to correct the evil, whether that evil is perceived or actual. And, generally, that’s when well-intentioned gestures that are in actuality quite futile begin to happen. We’ve see a lot of these lately. Removals or the vandalizing of statues, changing flags, changing logos, fleeing one social media platform for another in order to further exist in a silo. None of these actions do anything to actually contribute to a solution to the very real problems to which they are reactions. Often, in particularly insidious examples, these are the moves of marketing departments wanting to draw customers by appearing to take a stand when their company, like most, actually couldn’t care less.

The vast majority of the tweet storms, riots, monument removals, and social media shifts do absolutely nothing constructive. They are sound and fury, signifying nothing.

And that’s not even me being cynical. When I’m feeling particularly cynical, in fact, I don’t attribute these gestures to groupthink and desperation borne of feelings of powerlessness. I attribute them instead to the fact that we do these lesser things because the work of making actual change…of loving our neighbor as ourselves, of listening to and respecting opposing points of view, of considering all life as beautiful, and recognizing that we have more in common than we do different…that this work is just too hard, or something in which we actually have no interest.

That worries me the most, because that is a disease from which a society cannot recover.

Image of “The Scream” by Edvard Munch, 1893, taken from Wikimedia Commons. This image is in the public domain.

Finding the Positive

Slowly…ever so slowly…life is beginning to stir in northern New England. Almost as though we skipped spring and decided to wake from sleep directly into summer, we are beginning to re-discover old freedoms that feel new again. Workarounds and substitutions for real life have become so commonplace that I had forgotten what real experiences are like, although I’ve craved them. I met my friend for our weekly coffee in person last week for the first time since February. The last time that we saw each other face-to-face, there was snow outside the coffee shop window. That’s disconcerting, to say the least.

Other freedoms are still delayed, some more frustrating than others…Karen and I long to worship with a faith community again, not just the distanced images on a screen. Working out at the gym appears to be some weeks away, as well, something which I find contributing of my weakened state when I’m confronted with an uncharacteristically hot day in May, a day that feels more like July, which immediately curtails any sort of morning run.

Since the end of March, though, I’ve substituted my usual workout days with either a run or a brisk walk. When we were traveling in March, just before the world broke, I got into the habit of taking a walk with my coffee in the morning to get some air before I started my work day. That practice morphed into not just my usual workout days, but most weekdays. I think that I’m in better shape now than before the pandemic, and have even gotten to know some others in the neighborhood as we’ve passed on the street.

Better fitness is perhaps the most unexpected positive effect of a stay-at-home order, but by far not the only one. Even though I only commute three days weekly on average, I’m saving between six and eight hours every week with Boston traffic out of the equation. That’s time that I’ve been able to spend spontaneously chasing my kids around our yard, or having leisurely conversations with Karen of the sort that we used to have in grad school. I’m catching up on a lot of reading. I’m even pausing to think and enjoy some quiet every now again. As we bleed into summer, our daughters have made friends with a neighbor…”best friends,” as they refer to themselves, which makes me recall my best friend in childhood, and how that friendship and those summer day experiences were so formative for me. I smile when I see my kiddos growing up into some of the same experiences.

I eagerly anticipate our release from suspended animation over the coming weeks, and have jumped at the chance to go out for coffee, and to make my weekly comic book run. This time in, though, as emotionally trying as it has been for all of us, has lent itself to some positive things if we look for them.

I have a hard time looking, but when I do, the good isn’t difficult to see.

Why We Need to Resume Life

A photo of empty tables and chairs in a restaurant setting. Used under Creative Commons.

I find it funny when I think about coming back from a relaxing holiday vacation. Funny in a not-so-funny way. I had such fantastic plans for 2020. Then, my first day back into the new year, I discovered that the company for which I work was acquired. I’m still trying to navigate the results of that. Then we discovered the downfall of only owning one vehicle when that vehicle was involved in an accident and had a transmission failure, back to back. I spent a good deal of the end of January and early February dealing with the logistics of that while still dealing with the fallout from the acquisition. Things were beginning to settle, though, as we left on a trip to assist my parents during a scheduled surgery. And then, just as I was looking forward to returning to our normal life in mid-March….well, you know the rest. One little virus, and the world broke.

2020, momentous as it begins a new decade, has stopped being the sort of year in which you achieve anything, and is becoming the sort of year that you just survive.

Now, as life begins to slowly re-open, I’m looking forward to returning to some sense of normal, even while forgetting that I’ve lived this fully remote life before. I’m seeing all sorts of positive things come from the extra time that I now have in my week with no commute, while still groaning about my first world problems…delayed haircuts, complications in getting coffee. There’s a cognitive dissonance here, but it arises from a restlessness, and a sadness as I watch others’ lives and livelihoods implode around me.

I suppose that this post might break with my rule against writing about politics, but, hey…extraordinary times, and all that. The propaganda machine is in high gear. I’m absolutely exhausted from constantly hearing some variation on the theme of “stay home, stay safe.” I’m particularly frustrated with how this is equated with “staying inside,” allowing popular opinion and convenient science to outweigh common sense in favor of corporate-driven interests. Despite the fact that fresh air and sunlight have been proven by, you guessed it, science, to combat illnesses such as this pandemic, such things are pushed aside with claims of lack of data. After all, pharmaceuticals can’t make money from fresh air and sunshine. It’s interesting how objective science, normally deified, becomes disposable when you don’t agree with its conclusions.

For the record, just in case you hadn’t guessed, I think Sweden has it right.

My issue is this at its simplest: we’re not safe. We can’t be safe. There is simply no such state, nor has there ever been. Grasping for this is nothing more than selfishness…”everyone do this extreme thing so that I won’t have a bad outcome.” At the end of the day, all of our steps to mitigate this pandemic are security theatre, just like airports after the attacks of 9/11. The nonsense at airports, though, has stayed with us, has been woven into our culture as the subject of jokes and as a general expectation. And that’s what scares me about this, because we can’t live six feet apart forever. As a people, we will die. We will go insane.

We already are.

The predictions and half-baked data modeling only serve to solidify this expectation. The emotional and psychological damage that we’re doing to each other is already incalculable. Humans die without contact, without touch.

So, when I see photos of people crowding into parks in beautiful weather, I don’t gasp and have the rage response that the rest of Twitter does. I see hope. Hope that we are willing to just push through this, hope that many see that life is going to go on, regardless, and that it’s better to be with each other as it does. I don’t want to waste week after week – time that we will never get back – cowering at home in fear, clinging to such an illusory concept as safety. A life arrested isn’t life. Its existence, at best, and at worst a prolonged death, a slow burn. It’s a death of the spirit, and that stands to be the larger casualty of this pandemic.

Just like the other casualties, though, we can minimize it, if we decide that we want to do so. But we have to do so by living. We can’t accept anything less.

Image attribution: Kevin Spencer under Creative Commons.