The New Normal
Like most people, the sudden impact of COVID-19 threw me for a spin. I spent a few days in high anxiety, a couple of weeks where very little seemed relevant except the well-being of my family. All of us respond differently in a crisis, and whilst I remained high functioning during business hours, off the clock I wanted to either lie in bed napping intermittently or frenetically plan our escape elsewhere, a foolhardy attempt to outrun a global pandemic.
But human beings are resilient, and what was foreign mere weeks ago now feels like a new kind of normal. It’s exceedingly rare to have an opportunity during one’s adult years to have time to take stock, but if there is a silver lining to our near-universal work-from-home environment it’s that we now do. I would argue there are other silver linings too, though I recognize that for some this pandemic has brought terrible loss and grief. Being forced to contemplate life from inside the walls of our Brooklyn apartment while the world wails outside has made me think about changes this crisis has brought, and ones that may still lie ahead. Although most of us are hoping that life as we know it will soon return to normal, it seems inevitable that a global event of this magnitude will change the world forever in some fundamental ways.
A Time for Grace. None of us knows who around us may be vulnerable to this virus. We don’t know which of our colleagues have underlying conditions. The person next to you may look as young and fit as you, and yet they may also have an immunodeficiency, asthma, a lung condition or diabetes. When all of this started, I heard many people playing down the severity of the crisis because it was unlikely to directly affect them. To make these statements without knowing who around you might be feeling genuine fear right now reveals a fundamental lack of compassion. Can you imagine how it must feel to be a senior during this crisis? To have heard people on the news, in daily life, saying early on that this is serious only for older people? To realize suddenly that many of these younger people would rather go out and live their lives as usual, knowingly risking your death, than temporarily curb their habits? This is a time for grace. Now that social distancing is widespread, we are talking about it as an act of love for those who are more vulnerable, and it is. Across the world, we are seeing acts of kindness – from soup deliveries to the elderly to cash gifts for the jobless. In America, a society that is built on individualism, we are being required across the board to consider others in our daily actions, and that’s a good thing. Let’s carry this grace forwards with us, let it be the legacy of this awful period in history.
The Birds are Singing. Even if you don’t live in New York City, you know this: it’s never quiet. Day or night, sirens sound, car horns complain, passersby laugh and swear and shout. You get used to it, for the most part. It’s a key characteristic of the city that never sleeps. But New York now sounds totally different. Our street is empty. No traffic, no honking horns, no sirens, no more swearing. Instead, the birds are singing. I hear them first thing in the morning and all day long. Church-bells ring faintly in the distance – a sound I’ve never heard before in New York, even though we live near several churches. The other day a squirrel poked his head in our back door, glancing at me as I sat at my work desk, as if it was wondering where all the people had gone. In bed at night, I am woken by the slightest noise because mostly now it is completely silent. This is a different New York City. It feels alien, but also peaceful – a stark juxtaposition against what I see on the news, hospitals chaotic and overrun, temporary morgues filling laneways, unclaimed bodies buried in a mass grave.
Everyone is Doing the Best They Can. We are all suddenly home-schooling children, juggling remote work and conference calls and new technology with teaching schedules and kids and pets under foot. Some people are dealing with sick family members or friends, or with the sudden loss of loved ones. As a type A personality, I demand of myself certain standards of perfectionism – but this is a time to recognize that everyone is doing what they can in the circumstances. My children have had to say goodbye to face-to-face interactions, learn how to use computers and keyboards, move their music lessons online, and stay inside. Neighbours and friends have lost jobs and income. People are anxious and worried. Those who live alone are now not just alone, they are lonely. If children want more cuddles than usual or if they can’t make it through the whole virtual school day – that’s ok. If people express themselves less diplomatically than usual in meetings or email, we should be giving them the benefit of the doubt. We are all trying to get through this the best that we can.
Families Closer Than Ever. For a long time it has been assumed that increased technology use reduces family closeness and connection. But we now have four laptops instead of two in our household. We’ve had to purchase a product that amplifies our wi fi because all of us are using it all day long. Yet I am seeing more of my kids than I have since starting work in New York. I am suddenly able to help with art projects, answer questions about the books they are reading. When I get up to make tea, I get hugs too. My son takes his lunch hour in the bedroom, so he can quietly lie next to me while I work. We have dinner together every night, and most other meals too. This is proof positive that we can marry family life and technology use; we just needed to alter other parts of our daily schedules to make it all possible.
The Zeitgeist. Instagram cooking shows. Celebrities opening up their homes, letting us in with live chats and videos. Musicians playing songs we request over social media. Films released straight onto streaming platforms. Dance instructors and trainers teaching thousands of people across the world simultaneously on virtual platforms. I follow along with Ryan Heffington in my kitchen with headphones on, while my husband works in the living room and my kids study at the dining table. On TikTok, a platform I had never watched before, COVID-19 challenges and dances and quarantine videos go viral. A new terminology is evolving: “quarantini” “iso” “covid-times” “in lockdown”. In Miami and Dubai, DJs turn apartment complexes into socially distanced balcony dance clubs. Everyone and their pets are using Zoom, with virtual backgrounds. Friends I haven’t heard from in years are suddenly back on social media, driven to it as their actual social lives shut down. Italians sing from balconies, Canadians compete to help others in acts of “caremongering”. There is a collective experience of this period that we are all sharing, a spirit of this time that will live on in each of us.
New Memories. I stand with my kids on our brownstone stoop at 7pm each evening and we clap and bang on pots and pans along with everyone up and down our street, leaning out of windows and standing on balconies to show support for healthcare workers in our community – and for solidarity, to prove to each other we are still here. We start our days with mindfulness exercises and a yoga flow in our living room, before the kids start their school day in the dining room, and we end our days with “P.E. with Joe”, a YouTube gym class. We go for family walks once a day, all of us wearing masks. The kids are learning to stay more than a meter away from anyone we pass, it’s becoming habitual. We search for home-made rainbows as we walk, the COVID-19 scavenger hunt that has been popularized by social media. Instead of live playdates, we have Zoom calls – the kids chat first, disappearing into their rooms with their devices, and then hand over to the parents, so we can catch up in our respective kitchens, drinks in hand. Piano, guitar, ballet lessons are all now virtual, the kids following along with teachers in Google Hangouts. I grew up in Europe during Chernobyl and remember my dad measuring radiation in our garden with a Geiger counter. What will our children remember of this time?
New Heroes. Not all heroes wear capes, or carry guns. The trope of the military hero has given way to heroes in scrubs, on delivery bikes, behind cash registers. The frontline has changed, and with it the valuation of essential workers in our communities. Nurses and doctors, medics in ambulances, hospital cleaning staff – they are working through trauma to save us. Without them, our society would be failing. Beyond that, there are those who are risking their health keeping our supermarkets open. My husband waits for two hours, six feet apart from others in the queue, in order to shop at the Park Slope Co-Op, where members are no longer working but paid employees are. Our local deli is still open, restaurants have transitioned to take-out models, an Italian up the road has created an open-air grocery stocked with raw ingredients, pasta and wine. Deliveries are left on the doorstep, the bearers wearing gloves and masks to protect themselves. Teachers have had to pivot at a moment’s notice and develop entirely online modules using new technology platforms that must nevertheless provide students with the learning necessary to complete the school year. Few of these jobs are highly paid, but we must learn through this that they should be.
No More Commute. My one hour, twice daily commute is suddenly gone and I have two extra hours in my day. We bought a stationary bike and I’m using that time to exercise, cook, spend time with my family. Online I’m seeing friends take up hobbies they’ve never had time for before. Ours is a civilization that has become reliant on outsourcing domestic processes, but we are now baking sourdough bread and apple pies at home, growing vegetable patches wherever there is a drop of sun, reading hard copy books, spinning yarn and crocheting. This is a time filled with such contradictions. Technology has allowed us to exist both connected yet remote from others, a modern-day success story – but simultaneously the world looks more like it used to, a return to domesticity, a slow-down. Through this crisis we’ve discovered that technology can do exactly what it was intended to do: it can give us back more time. We just needed to learn to use that gift properly. Working remotely is entirely feasible for many people, and perhaps now that we know this it will be an answer to traffic and congestion as well as a way to restore much-needed work-life balance.
We Need So Much Less Than We Thought. I saw a tweet recently from someone asking why they have so many shoes. It resonated because we are all wearing far fewer clothes than we once were. My quarantine outfits require no dry cleaning. I open my wardrobe and wonder why I have so many handbags when I never use even one anymore. The fashion bloggers and Instagram style posts that were rampant just last month seem sillier than they ever did. We need less than we thought we did, in so many ways. In an effort to go out less, we are more cognizant of using all the ingredients we have in our pantry and fridge as we plan our meals. I wonder what impact this new mindset might have on the fast fashion industry, on our tendency to overstock and produce waste. We are seeing cleaner air and cleaner water – will we also see less landfill out of all of this?
All the World Together. Physical borders have closed but cultural borders are opening. We are accustomed to watching the news from the safety of our living rooms, viewing what’s happening on the other side of the world as something remote and far removed from our own experiences. In our lifetime, wars have been localized affairs, happening “over there” to “other people”. Now, all of us are going through the same thing at the same time. Some countries are further ahead or behind on the curve, and unfortunately some nations will experience worse ramifications of this than others - but regardless of nationality or race, all of us are dealing with Coronavirus. Rather than the politicized xenophobia some have expressed, this shared experience and shared loss should bring us all closer together. It will be interesting to see if there is some manifest proof of that when borders eventually re-open.
A Time for Grace