As yesterday came to a close, I began wondering…
“What am I missing here?”
First, I’ll comment on the weather. It was a very lovely late spring day. There were a few of those fluffy, friendly clouds that make animal-shapes in the sky. There was a pleasant breeze that would pick up at just the right moment to cool a sweating brow. The day began with a temperature in the high 60’s, and ended with a not-overly-oppressive mid-80’s mercury bulb.
The sky had that lovely soft blue shade that comes with a less humid situation, and the greens and yellows of trees and grasses contrasting against this light azure sky was calming to my senses and my soul. The sun’s rays were hot but not scorching. The birds flitted about, their chirping and singing gave the afternoon a rhythm and a solid vibe, right from Nature’s own heartbeat.
My wife and I decided to spend a day in a public place, of all things, the zoo. It has been a year and a half without spending much time in places other than for necessities, where others would also be found. We needed to be in a situation where we could test ourselves against the real world. We have to see how much we’ve changed, how much we’ve grown as a species and community. We needed to see if “We’re open!” meant throwing all caution to the four winds, or would people in an open air environment still employ all the tools and skills we tried to reinforce for species survival, in the face of a very serious environmental threat.
We wanted to try to feel “normal.”
I don’t even know where to begin. The headrush of old and new feelings, being in a very familiar place, walking along pathways, seeing people, families, folks of all ages, is still settling out in my mind. There’s novelty and familiarity. There is memory that we’ve all come through something horrible.
This is what “normal” feels and appears to be like.
It is a good thing.
Political leaders and businesses desperately need for the pandemic to be over and for life to return to what it was 18 months ago. Coffers are running dry. The ability to remain in business and not simply roll up the tent and walk away has been hard pressed. Yes, the very economic life-blood must return, the financial drought we experienced has to be over. It has to. This is something that hit us in ways that made us horribly, terribly, awfully angry, sad and afraid. It was so abnormal, and death was stalking all of us. A virus was on the loose, in a way that we hadn’t seen in one hundred years.
The night before, a late night pair of comedians/talk show hosts were jousting and jesting about the “Wuhan Novel Coronavirus Laboratory.” While it might have been a little too soon to express humor and sarcasm regarding this wound, especially since we only surmise that this novel beastie came out of a lab, the scab was itchy, and Jon Stewart scratched at it until it bled a little. That’s the point of comedy. But are we all really ready for it? Is this the time to call this recovery complete and declare ourselves “normal” again?
“What am I missing here?”
Sanjay Gupta MD expressed it rather nicely last night. He suggested to the audience that America had become as his patient, and that we’re all in the early stages of recovering. We’re not out of the woods yet. This should never be regarded as something “normal” and we are going to bear wounds. It will take a long, long time to understand this. Very likely, we made our situation worse by not responding in a timely fashion. There’s plenty of consensus for that.
We’ve learned some tools and techniques that were uniquely trained and employed by healthcare, and in hospitals, these tools were reserved for operating rooms, pre-op, ICU, critical care, infectious disease floors, and for individuals with broken or suppressed immunity who needed to be protected from Nature and its orderly way of rebalancing the life-death equation.
Nature sees the order in our loss of life. We do not. We see this as chaos. It is however a consequence of normal living on the third rock from Old Sol, in a far-flung arm of a galaxy we call Milky Way, in a constantly expanding universe that we only think we know the edges of.
It isn’t normal to walk around wearing a mask. It isn’t normal to be out in the world, having to protect ourselves from Nature, when all we want to do is be a part of it. It is really not normal to have to consider on a lovely spring day, that my inhalation of another’s cough could kill me, simply because I did not get a vaccine — for whatever my reasons — and that they had absolutely no way of knowing they were a carrier of this novel molecular beast called a virus, because, in the luck of the draw, their receptors for attachment, infection and multiplication were few, and the virus just didn’t get a foothold. Vaccines, while unique to our species as a means of self-protection and host-defense “education,” are yet another layer in the protective web that helps us sustain as an organism. No. Shots aren’t “normal.” But we take them because they’ve been demonstrated to work with incredible efficiency at holding back Nature’s accountancy.
Normalcy is a moving target. If there’s anything that is missing, it is that concept.
Normal and Acceptable. Two words we should not conflate. They don’t belong together. They drive two different vehicles through our lives. It may be acceptable to disregard rules for survival when they are issued. It might be normal to have the chaos of a death stalker coming for us — after all, I was at the zoo, and we house predators there. It isn’t acceptable to have the lions, tigers, bears (oh my!) roaming about with the people. The mix is usually not good in its outcome.
Zoos are places where people are on one side of a moat, partition or net, and the wilder creatures are on the other. We go to these places to see the animals, to see the enclosures we build, to visit with old friends and make new ones, to have pleasant days out with family and to recover from difficulties by going to a touchpoint like this. We can get a strong sense of how the world is when we attempt to pull both acceptable and normal out of the chaos that Nature considers okay.
6 years ago, we lost our ability to discern between normal and acceptable. Losing this partition, breaking down that netting and filling the moat allowed the wilder parts of our thoughts and feelings to fully emerge and move about the entirety of our reality. We got infected with a “virtual virus,” a thought-and-feeling mechanism that began breaking down the last remaining fences of orderly and decent behavior. The ballooning threat of Great Chaos was constantly in front of us. Our anger, our fear and a manic press for the Next Most Absurd, Vicious and Ridiculous Thing became the meat grinder that took our ethics and morality through an extrusion into toxic sausage. We got sick. We all became very distorted.
In this grinder, contaminants and impurities that we used to train out of our social interactions — persistent use of four-letter words in everyday conversation, including around children, loss of temperament, name-calling, bullying, ethnic and racial intolerance, financial inequities, insults and derision toward individuals and groups who need extra care and patience, hastily fomented hostility toward others, indifference toward those who are less fortunate, suspicion of anyone not from your family, close friends or alliances, unearned and unreasonable loyalty to people, place and things, women and children being hit, hurt or abused, manipulation and extortion of others.
The list goes on. You get the point, I hope. We left all of that impurity in our daily grind. We “normalized” it and we ALSO accepted it.
We hoped against reason that we could stomach these toxic chorizo links and that the poison they elute wouldn’t kill us. We were wrong. It weakened us. It made us ever more susceptible to Nature’s accountancy. One hundred and seventy seven million cases worldwide, almost 4 million persons dead because of a virus that, whether manipulated in a facility or not, would become its own version of Jurassic Park — a zoo where there’s no petting the animals, and when they get out, they eat the visitors. Our immune system does not do well when we live in a way that is disorderly. The one we got from Nature is only good for about 45 years without being careful and thoughtful about our daily exposures. That same immune system also does not do well in a world where we don’t regulate and show due caution for our thoughts, deeds, words and everyday practices.
This virus should have been no worse than a common cold. It should have remained contained. It did not. It followed Nature’s rules for increasing the chaos, rebalancing the life-death equation, and leaving all of us trying to adjust to a new “normal.” How it got out? Some will investigate this. A few will argue for more transparency. Fewer still will try to collect on a debt that will never be settled. Humans reach for that “blame-finding, finger pointing” thing (attribution) when they are hard-pressed, short on both temper and tolerance, and just basically upset and angry about way too many things.
As I sat, relaxing with a small bowl of Dipping Dots ( a relatively abnormal food, but it was so tasty!) I began to fully appreciate the value of that light azure and the contrast with trees, grasses, living creatures and my own kind milling about, some still protecting, some obviously not caring, becoming self-aware and aware of those around me who in my attribution were “stupid, careless and unthinking.” They are not. They are simply humans, needing the same things we were looking for, that is, evidence of the human race, doing the best they know how, trying not to fall prey to Nature’s rules, all abundantly on display on this bright, blue-sky day.
Rabbi Harold Kushner wrote a little book in which he discussed the ways we all fall victim to the vicissitudes of life. Bad things keep happening. They happen to people. We are all both good and bad. We attribute the good things that happen to “good” people and the bad things to the “bad ones.” Both are scarred by life’s wounds. We both get hit by Nature’s accountancy. This day, with all its normalcy, did not include such an outcome. It has entered the long list of incredible moments from a life sensed, felt and lived.
A Good Thing, when it happens, is but one step in the Journey. A Good Thing comes as a motivation to pursue and remediate the unacceptable inventory of toxic sausage. Good Things arrive in all sorts of package sizes. There’s no need to brag about them. There’s no differential for their award. Every one of us has a metric for what’s desired, or “good” and what we don’t want, or “bad.”
This story was one of my Good Things inventory. It helps me deal with the other “bad” stuff — things I don’t want to do but might have to deal with. You’ll undoubtedly come up with your own list — and I really hope you will. Sort out the Normal from the Acceptable. Don’t allow those two vehicles to run in tandem, they are designed for driving on two distinctly different highways. What you will accept really does depend on being around your fellow humans, and being able to see them, be with them, interact with them in a way that informs you agreeably. You don’t want to be hurt, insulted, or demeaned. Getting herded into a thought-and-feeling corral instead of being shown the wide open range where you can move about freely isn’t a path to choose. When you feel the problem is oversimplified, the choices are too limiting, there’s too much urgency and you must be tempted with bait, ask questions. Get answers. “I don’t know” is an acceptable answer. Having doubts is important. Dwelling on them and catastrophizing life because of those doubts is certainly going to distort your normalcy.
Wait for it. Sooner or later, better answers will follow. They might not be the ones you wanted to hear. They will make much better sense.
We need to come together and examine what makes us human, what we want to accept and what we find disgusting and spoiled. It may have filtered in and become part of the grind, and we have to find ways to stop putting it in. We have to move toward an evidence-based examination of our human reality. If we don’t have the evidence, we need to be careful about making things up out of a desperate need to be “right.” Being wrong is okay. It isn’t how many times you are wrong that matters, it is how many time you tried to get the correct answer. At some point, you must accept what the evidence presented tells you. Strong evidence — as in our Acceptability Sausage laced with toxic Normality — is usually so overwhelmingly obvious that the smell not only bowls you over, but your brain will never un-see or un-smell it. The Bad Thing is the sensory experience. The Good Thing is your mind’s power and ability to inventory the memory, and protect you in the future.
If you read all the way to the end of this piece, thank you. It is a great kindness to have something I wrote read by someone else, whether or not they think it applies to them, or that they just need to hurl a tomato at it. Tomatoes are fine. I don’t consider them Bad Things. They help me stay humble. We just don’t have the time or patience any more for thoughtful explorations. We live in the accelerated time of the “thought bite,” the snack-sized morsel of impulsivity that can’t spend much time on the shade of blue or the kind of grass seen. Slowing down the pace in a recovering society is truly important. It allows us to segregate the vehicles of Normal and Acceptable and operate them on the correct roads for each one.
Hoping you will capture your Good Things and store them, and that your recovery moves you along a road with few Bad Things. Peace.