In the Time of Coronavirus

Today I'm completing my third week at home, semi-sheltering from the corona virus. Twice a week I go to work to care for the animals in our teaching collection. Other days I work on Fernbank's social media and website, here at home. I am also my household's self-appointed hammer when it comes to running errands like grocery shopping.

I have known all through this that
I am quite privileged: my salary continues to show up in my bank account. Same for Margaret (though Margaret works harder than ever as she teaches her students at a distance). I have plenty to do here at home that engrosses me. We both prefer to do most of our own cooking, and we enjoy each other's company.

But I am not at ease. Partly this is simply fear of the illness: either contracting it myself or watching loved ones go through it (no matter the outcome, and we have heard from Margaret's sister that the outcome is not a simple binary of recovery or death: many survivors will live with permanent respiratory or renal damage).

I am also struggling in a malaise of indistinct outlines. It feels like a compound of fear that I'll lose my job; guilt that I'm not doing more with this gift of time; a lack of my usual exercise (of course the gyms are closed); outrage at my country's typical, predictable barbaric response; and other minor components that drift in and out of my awareness.

One conclusion I've drawn during my sulky rumination is that whatever other changes this pandemic brings, I want it to be the occasion of my living in a way more aligned with my values. Don't ask me to be more specific yet. So far the only practical change I've decided on is "commute by bicycle."

Last night someone sent me a quote from an essay on the pandemic by Arundhati Roy, published the other day in The Financial Times:

What is this thing that has happened to us? It’s a virus, yes. In and of itself it holds no moral brief. But it is definitely more than a virus. Some believe it’s God’s way of bringing us to our senses. Others that it’s a Chinese conspiracy to take over the world. 

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture. But the rupture exists. And in the midst of this terrible despair, it offers us a chance to rethink the doomsday machine we have built for ourselves. Nothing could be worse than a return to normality. 

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. 

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

I spent several sleepless hours last night thinking these things. Roy's words resonate strongly enough that I am compelled to share them here. I carry them forward, I hope, not in a simplistic "making lemonade" mindset, but, as those Puritans I studied 30 years ago would have said, truly chastened.