I expected it to feel more foreign, this place we now find
ourselves in. But I feel the lack of shopping trips and dinners out and
friendly hangouts less keenly than one might have thought. Even the loss of my
livelihood feels softer now that the initial wave of shock and sadness has
rolled through. Instead, I am struck by the pervasiveness of the mundane and
the familiar, the daily rituals that mark the passage of time and carry me steadily
from one moment to the next: brewing a pot of tea and sitting down to write my
morning pages while the house is still quiet and dark; stretching out last
night’s stiffness with a YouTube yoga video and a quick walk through the
neighborhood with Zoe; checking the to-do list and planning out the day; later,
preparing dinner, doing dishes, and reading in bed until my eyelids grow too
heavy to continue. Also: sneezing countless times a day, almost never while in
reach of the tissue box; mixing yogurt into the dogs’ kibble and letting them
take turns licking the spoon; telling J he can put on whatever record he is in
the mood for after dinner – I don’t mind either way – and tucking my cold toes
into the warm arches of his feet when we go to bed.
Yes, there have been changes as well: waiting for a
two-hour delivery window to become available in the Prime Now app instead of a
weekly trip to the local market; sitting on the deck in the late afternoon, soaking
up the sun’s rays on my back and neck, instead of sitting at my desk, struggling to stay motivated
for the last few hours of the workday; washing my hands so frequently that the
skin on the back of my knuckles becomes cracked and dry; living under the same
roof as my brother for the first time in twenty years and chatting with him and
J over dinner about recipes, New York City, or Hannah Arendt.
All of these things are new, but none of them feels strange.
The additions and shifts, like the thinnest of threads, have been woven into
the existing fabric of daily life, creating no perceptible distortions in the
warp and weave. Only the closest scrutiny reveals any change to the texture and
thickness of my routines; overall, they feel as warm and comforting to me as
ever.
There is also, of course, the overarching sense of
uncertainty infused in all of it, old patterns and newly-forming habits alike. We
know so very little right now about what is truly going on, how long it will
last, or what life will be like next week, next month, next year even. But this
is not actually new, is it? The uncertainty was already with us, before we arrived
in this place, masked by the seemingly steady nature of the status quo but
teeming under the surface nonetheless. This space we are now in has simply
heightened our awareness of the fact that any place, any time, any life is
always, by its very nature, precarious. And so I must learn to weave this understanding into the daily rituals, along with all the other changes, until it
too is one more thread in the tapestry, an integrated and integral part of my life.
[Like the previous post, this one is also a response to a prompt from the Isolation Journals.]
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