What does “pandemic re-entry” look and feel like? For me, everything seems tinged with anxiety on a very long measuring stick…from a faint, barely perceptible hum, all the way up the scale to fight-or-flight mode. As many others seem to be doing, I seek a calming salve to apply to my swirling emotions.
Toward that end, I sometimes use a tried-and-true coping strategy from my cognitive filing cabinets. Amid the jostling crowd of stimuli, events and circumstances comprising all that I do not know, I try to tune out the noise, in order to find and protect a small, quiet voice. It asks me to turn my back on the craziness, just for a moment, and identify just one familiar, sure, proven thing. The least common denominator, in other words. That is the salve.
Recently, the one sure, proven thing I found is this: there is movement.
That statement conveys no emotion, no judgement, no need to act. The quality or act of movement is contained in chaos. It is contained in breathing in and out. It is contained in birth, death, destruction, sunrise, water, wind, time, space.
Throughout the pandemic, movement was endemic. Movement of the daily—sometimes even hourly—changes in the rules for staying alive. Movement in the sudden shifts from what was known, to what was unknown, back to the known. Movement in pacing around our houses like caged animals.
Either we learned to cope with the uncertainty, or we braced against it and hoped for the time when we could return to “normal.”
Are we “back to normal” when we do things we haven’t done in 16 months? Well, sort of. But we do those things in the context of joy, wonder, sorrow, loss, reflection. The return to doing “normal” things is reassuring, and it has layers. For example, as I look at some recent family photos, there we all are, standing close and smiling. But there’s an invisible layer, like infrared or ultraviolet light. It’s the presence of gratitude, relief, joy, illuminating life-force. That gets back to the idea of movement—a solid, reassuring fact. An energy we cannot see, but whose presence is undeniable.
The pandemic re-entry also brings the movement of circumstances, like the detailed inner workings of a timepiece. They are inexorable; one element trips the movement of another. We are still in the earliest stages of experiencing all the outcomes of this tragedy. Infinite numbers of circumstances infinitely trigger other circumstances. Each one is an insight that sheds more light on movement and change.
With that in mind, it stands to reason that “normal” is probably gone forever. But what if we used another word for it – perhaps “familiar.” Then the recovery journey could be practical, like a city map. A tool to help us find the work-around and figure out another way to do things. We had plenty of opportunities to practice that during the pandemic. Why not put that experience to use as a coping tool for the days ahead?
If I were to deploy the map analogy, finding the “familiar” could be like driving home after a long day at work. I know my destination, but I need to consider another route if there’s a crash or a mudslide or road construction. In the larger context, despite the disappointment that “normal” seems so elusive and far away, there can still be movement forward.
When preparing to write this post, I turned to nature for inspiration, as I often do. The theme of movement carried my mind to the ocean. Not the shore, but the abyss—way out there where the land is far away and the water’s movement is powerful, primal, dark and deep. Resting in that image, a word came to mind, for no apparent reason: upwelling. Here is its definition:
Upwelling is an oceanographic phenomenon that involves wind-driven motion of dense, cooler, and usually nutrient-rich water from deep water towards the ocean surface, replacing the warmer, usually nutrient-depleted surface water.
To express something in words, I sometimes rest in their meaning, like a teabag. The swirling uncertainty we experience might be the upwelling movement of ourselves, our lives, our minds and spirits, bringing nutrients and some sort of balance, ease and harmony. It’s going to happen slowly, in nature’s own good time.
