What have we learned?

 

Lessons from the Lockdown

“If all difficulties were known at the outset of a long journey, most of us would never start out at all.”

Dan Rather

          There was an article recently in The Atlantic magazine about the fact that some of us remember what passed for “normal” prior to the pandemic, and we don’t want to go back. Hindsight, they say, is twenty-twenty. But I am one of those who applaud that decision. What we Americans called normal before we were locked down long enough to think a clear-headed thought, was chaos in every arena. The traffic was horrible, the ozone had big holes in it, we were sniping and trolling one another and saying truly nasty things on social media. And we were working ourselves into early graves.

The pandemic shutdown caused us to stop in literal and in metaphorical ways. We got to rethink our priorities. We realized that the driven nature of our economy may have pumped out money, but it was no way to live a happy life. During the shutdown, we got reacquainted with our families, played with our children, cooked our meals together, and participated up-close in what our kids were learning, or failing to learn, in school. We had to look at what racism has done to us, and what cruelty human beings are capable of. We had to confront our own role in that. We aren’t “cured” yet, but awareness is the essential step.

          Do you remember when you went to the grocery store and were stampeded by desperate people getting to the toilet paper isle? How normal was that? And road rage took on a whole new meaning. It became the norm to lay on the horn and make nasty hand gestures toward complete strangers. I don’t know about you, but that is not a “normal” I’m in a hurry to return to. The unemployment rate might have been good, but the old question of do we live to work or work to live came up again. Some people who worked three jobs to keep a roof over their heads are not thinking of those as “the good old days.”

          Many of life’s difficulties we cannot see coming. If we had known ahead of time that a pandemic was on the way, we certainly would not have chosen it. But it’s important to learn the lessons it offered. We were so accustomed to a non-stop, bust your butt, lifestyle that we thought it was normal. Now we know there is another way to live—one that is less cruel and more civil. One that respects the limits of our time and realizes that productivity alone does not constitute a successful life. The quality of life is better now, and I for one am not eager to get back to “normal.” I wonder about you?

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane