Introspection: Normal?

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Normal?

So, I'm all for just going ahead and having a good time - the best possible.  The only earthly good men and women can look forward to is to eat and drink well and have a good time - compensation for the struggle for survival these few years God gives us on earth.

Ecclesiastes 8:15 (The Message)

Don't it always seem to go
That you don't know what you got 'til it's gone
They paved paradise, and put up a parking lot

From "Big Yellow Taxi" by Joni Mitchell

You may or may not have noticed lately that I have not been publishing posts on this blog quite as frequently as I did in the past.  The simple reason is that I have struggled to find inspiration or motivation.  Sometimes I wonder if maybe the proverbial well has dried up and I've run out of things to write.  You might have also noticed that, though I had been posting an introspection every month for the last couple of years, until now introspective posts have been totally nonexistent this year.  The reason is that lately there hasn't been much about my life I've wanted to share with the world.

I had a couple of stressful months this year.  For a few days in early February, I had some strange symptoms which resulted in my getting tested for COVID-19.  To my relief, the test came back negative.  I did not believe that I had actually contracted the virus, as I did not have any typical symptoms except for a slightly elevated body temperature, but the experience was still rather frightening.  Then, in early March, the governor of my state issued an executive order stating that all state employees were to return to their workplaces, meaning that I was no longer allowed to work from home.  Though I'm actually happier to be working at the office, the prospect of having to return to a full office before I had the opportunity to be fully vaccinated made me a bit anxious.  Amid all these things, I'm still processing the loss of my father.

As I noted on New Year's Eve, my only goal for this year was to be vaccinated against COVID-19 as soon as I was able to do so and then to wait for life to return to whatever semblance of normal is possible.  I'm happy to report that, by the end of April, I was considered fully vaccinated.¹  Just four months into the year, I had completed my singular New Year's resolution.  All that was left for me to do was to wait.

It turned out that my waiting would not be long.  Just ten days ago, on May 13, Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control, announced, "If you are fully vaccinated, you can start doing the things that you had stopped doing because of the pandemic."  She also announced that, in most situations, vaccinated people no longer need to wear masks indoors or practice social distancing.²  The announcement seemed too good to be true.  Not having to wear a mask didn't really matter too much to me, but I had been waiting for over a year for some "green light" to start doing the things I did before the pandemic.

During the weekend after the announcement, I started easing back into my life as it was before the pandemic.  On Friday evening, I hung out in a cafe for the first time in over a year.  My mother gave me a new tablet for Christmas, and I was finally able to use it outside of my home.  Before the pandemic, I did almost all of my writing in coffeeshops.  On Saturday evening, I ate inside a restaurant I once frequented.  On Sunday, I enjoyed lunch with a good friend of mine at a cafe near our church.  Lunch at this cafe was like a weekly after-church ritual for us in our pre-pandemic lives.

Last week, the campus of my alma mater was finally opened to the public, so, one day after work, I drove over there to take took a long walk, as I did in the past.  On another day after work, I took a walk at a park not far from my workplace.  Later this month, I will meet some of my friends for a Memorial Day get-together.

Lately, I've been re-reading The Alchemist, which I originally read back in 2019.  One passage, which incidentally I read at a restaurant after the announcement from the CDC, really struck me:
The silence of the desert was a distant dream; the travelers in the caravan were talking incessantly, laughing and shouting, as if they had emerged from the spiritual world and found themselves once again in the world of people.  They were relieved and happy.³

I know that not everybody is on the same page regarding the CDC's announcement.  Personally, I have decided to trust my vaccination to do what it was designed to do and to reclaim some of the things that were taken from me by the pandemic.  For various reasons, I still wear a mask inside stores, and sometimes, by either choice or necessity, I sit outside at coffeeshops and restaurants, so I cannot yet say that my life has fully returned to normal.  That said, I'm just grateful that I'm once again doing things I enjoyed doing before the pandemic.

People have been saying that life should not return to how it was before the pandemic or that life cannot return to normal.  Quite frankly, I don't want to hear it.  My life changed a lot in March of last year, when the shutdown was initially announced, but I have flat-out refused to dignify pandemic life with a phrase like new normal.  I've preferred to think of it as temporary crappiness we all needed to endure in order to keep ourselves and each other safe.  I understand that a lot of people needed to slow down and simplify their lives and that the pandemic forced us all to do so.  My "old normal" consisted of things like hanging out in coffeeshops with my tablet and writing, sharing long conversations with friends over coffee, taking long walks at beautiful places around town, and dancing on the weekends.  There was nothing problematic about any of these things, and there is no reason I should not want them back.

I am not suggesting that, if we gained anything good during the pandemic, we should abandon it in favor of what we had beforehand.  Because of the pandemic, I started taking walks around my neighborhood, which I never did previously, and I've had the opportunity to meet some of my neighbors.  Now that I've returned to the places where I walked before the pandemic, I will probably keep taking walks around my neighborhood from time to time.  What I am saying is that, while we hold on to any good things we gained during the pandemic, at some point we also need to reclaim the good things we lost because of the pandemic.

If you had asked me back in 2019 what I thought of my life, I would have told you that I was dissatisfied.  Since then, I have found myself looking back on that year with fondness.  It only took a global pandemic to make me realize how good my life was.  If I have learned anything during this pandemic, it is that I should never take the things I enjoy in life for granted, no matter how simple they are.  May I never forget this lesson.


Notes:

1. One is considered "fully vaccinated" two weeks after one's last required dose of the vaccine.
2. https://youtu.be/S-2nE6AK1OU
3. Paulo Coelho.  The Alchemist (25th Anniversary Edition).  2014, Harper One.  pp. 90-91

The photographs featured in this introspection were taken by me in two of my "happy places."