4/11 Covid-19 Update: "Because hope is never dead"
Friends,
My laptop completely crashed yesterday (I'm pretty sure I saw actual sparks come out of it), which seemed like a pretty obvious metaphor for my brain all week. Work was frustrating (can we have a global effort to flatten the curve of the toxic masculinity epidemic please?), John Prine died, and I started really missing some "normal" things like coffee shops and hugs and airplanes. I tried to maximize time outside (the only thing that seems to get my brain to quiet down these days) and minimize time in front of a screen (hard to do in the current environment) and remember Anne Lamott's advice that most things, including ourselves, will start working again if we unplug them for a little bit.
I've gotten really into Q&A newsletter formats, and one of my favorites is the Red Hand Files, where Nick Cave answers questions from fans. This week, fans wrote and asked him what he thought of the new Bob Dylan song, and if he thought it might be his last new release. He responded:
Perhaps there is some wisdom in treating all songs, or for that matter, all experiences, with a certain care and reverence, as if encountering these things for the last time. I say this not just in the light of the novel coronavirus, rather that it is an eloquent way to lead one’s life and to appreciate the here and now, by savouring it as if it were for the last time. To have a drink with a friend as if it were the last time, to eat with your family as it were the last time, to read to your child as if it were the last time, or indeed, to sit in the kitchen listening to a new Bob Dylan song as if it were the last time. It permeates all that we do with greater meaning, placing us within the present, our uncertain future, temporarily arrested.
I know you can't possibly treat everything like it's the last time all the time. But I'm wondering what the harm would be in trying? If you had told me the last time John Prine released an album that it would be his last one ever, I would have listened to it differently. I would have sat down with a drink and savored it, knowing I wasn't going to hear a new song from him ever again. I'm sad now I didn't take that experience more seriously.
Coronavirus has made it easier for me to appreciate small things. I built a fire on the beach Thursday night, and felt like the luckiest person in the world to be sitting under the stars with the sound of the tiny Seattle waves crashing. Texts and phone calls from friends feel more meaningful. Most of my closest friends don't live in Seattle, and coronavirus has given us a reason to check on each other more often. I was reading this interview with the Call Your Girlfriend co-hosts about their new book and advice for "maintaining big friendships in hard times" (Tl;dr: prioritize the people you love, show up in big and small ways, set boundaries, be open to changing your actions to better meet their needs, and embrace the surprising perks of long-distance friendship like vulnerability), and it ended with this: "To know that there’s someone far away who thinks about you will keep me going for the rest of my life." I couldn't agree more.
Practically everything feels uncertain right now. I wake up most mornings and immediately start going through my list of all the things that need to be worried about. But my worrying isn't actually making any of those things better or less likely to happen. It's pouring energy into a bottomless hole, and there are other better, choices available to me. To focus my attention and appreciation on small, simple things, like fires and being thought of. To think about other people instead.
Ask Polly is another advice newsletter I love, and someone recently wrote to her asking how to possibly survive what's ahead. This was the advice I needed to read this week, so passing it along in case anyone else needs it too.
What can you create, every day, to bring you life, to build up your strength? What beauty is lurking underneath these terrors? As Ranier Maria Rilke wrote, “No feeling is final.”
The path before you is simple. You wake up in the morning and you put Chopin: Nocturnes in your headphones and you look for joy. You embrace every tiny glint of beauty and every scrap of hope hiding in this small, enclosed life. You surrender to the reality of this “borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it,” as Cormac McCarthy put it. You eat this divine silence, this dark longing, this lonely sweetness, this solitary dread. You sit in your quiet garden and welcome the weather, good or bad. No feeling is final. You are strong enough.
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If You Read One Thing:
This is a long read (30 min), but I think it asks some really interesting and important questions about the ethical choices surrounding when and how to reopen the US economy. The NYT interviewed five "thinkers" (interesting title ) and they discuss things like why we'll be able to survive deprivation for longer with a shared sense of higher purpose, the likelihood (and morality) of "immunity passports," how to maintain privacy, and whether we value the lives of older people the same way we value the lives of younger people.
Recommended reading
Coronavirus ‘is the Big One … I hope never to see bigger’: Harvard epidemiologist: "When will social distancing end? Will opening up contribute to second wave of disease? Is there a plan for blood tests? Where's the CDC? Why has the testing rollout been so bad? Scientist Marc Lipsitch answers our questions." (h/t Kate!)
(I think the internet is collapsing on itself when there's an explainer of an explainer article, but that's what this is). A piece from Ezra Klein at Vox summing up what prominent think tanks are hypothesizing it will take to reopen the economy (a shorter version than the NYT article above and more about the (im)practicality than the ethics). Summary: "In different ways, all these plans say the same thing: Even if you can imagine the herculean political, social, and economic changes necessary to manage our way through this crisis effectively, there is no normal for the foreseeable future. Until there’s a vaccine, the United States either needs economically ruinous levels of social distancing, a digital surveillance state of shocking size and scope, or a mass testing apparatus of even more shocking size and intrusiveness."
Covid-19 Poem of the Day
My friend Rachel sent this to me the other night when I was sitting at Green Lake, surrounded by wild geese (the universe is not subtle sometimes), and thinking of all the ways I should be better at my job. I felt like she and Mary Oliver were there with me, so sending this on for anyone else who might need to hear it.
It's been beautiful in Seattle this week. I keep thinking of the Anne Lamott quote (apparently I think of her quotes a lot) about how we're Easter Sunday people living in a Good Friday world. It's easier to believe in hope and rebirth when you're surrounded by proof of them in creation. Sending hope and love to all of you, in whatever parts of creation you find yourselves.
-Alison
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