Red's Wrap
Happiness. It's relative.
Fighting Back
If you’re not careful, a pandemic can really get you down.
I know this from experience.
A big part of the getting down is the dramatic shrinking of your life, well, your physical life. No meetings in person, no lunches, no volunteering, no meandering the library, no shopping, no travelling, no visiting, no ocean, no desert, no mountains. Now our house and our yard and our truck and the dog park, well, that’s pretty much it. I now leave an environmental footprint the size of an elf’s boot, not that my impact and resource consumption was so huge before. I am now but a wee lass, as they say.
So when your physical life shrinks, it’s kind of reflexive to have your intellectual life shrink as well. I have these tiny feet and these tiny boots, ergo, I have a tiny brain. Tiny ambition, tiny hopes, tiny dreams, all so tiny, like the smallest Legos forgotten under the couch. Easy to sweep up and put in the dustbin. (We have been watching a lot of British TV.) The pandemic can engender a ‘live in the moment’ intellectual life that devolves into mentally measuring the distances in other people’s interactions. All that checking on others can look smart but it’s actually dopey.
So where is all this going?
You’ve got to unhitch your intellectual life from your physical life. If you are of an age where your intellectual life is self-directed, that is, you’re not having to be smart in order to make a living, then you have to resist the temptation to just get through the day, to bide your time, to ‘get to cocktail hour’ as we say around here. You have to breathe life into your own ambition, your own hopes and dreams. You have to be exhilarated again by opportunity and possibility and what will happen next.
You must realize by now to whom I am speaking.
6 Comments on “Fighting Back”
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Snow Door | wisconsinacademy.org
Listen to Jan read her essay “Billy” presented on WUWM’s Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “At the Breakfast Bar” on WUWM Lake Effect
Jan’s essay “The Parish Hall,” on WUWM Lake Effect
“Fury Cannot Touch Me,” Modern Love, NYT, 9/29/11
Writing. Writing. Writing. I’m not exactly writing anything that’ll be considered for a Pulitzer, but I am living a bigger life through my characters.
Exactly. After nearly 4 months of lockdown here in South Africa, I know exactly what you mean about having your life taken away. I can identify completely with what you say. Now that the initial foggy lethargy of Lockdown has lifted, I find myself wondering: what will the New Normal present by way of external activities? I find myself chafing at the restrictions but al;so very mindful of the continuing (and for who knows how long?) threat of infection? I fall into the elderly-with-underlying-conditions category. I’m wrestling with the dilemma.
It’s gonna get better….it’s gonna get better….it’s gonna get better….or so I tell myself. A day at a time.
My problem is, I spend too long on things of the mind and need to drag myself away for more physical exercise. The dogs must be walked daily, so I look forward to the time when our puppy is long enough for “proper” walks. The old dog who has left us in her seventeenth year, was no longer up to long walks and the dog walk was always the time when my mind was free to solve problems and grow ideas.
It remains to be seen what distances I will be capapble of myself when the time comes.
I write and I take pictures and I read. In between, I talk to friends on the phone and clean. Then I go back and i write and I take more pictures. Because if I don’t, I won’t have a brain left to use.
Your photos are amazing and you are so incredibly prolific and right on in your writing so I think your system is working.