Have you noticed that some ungloved customers in supermarkets are making their hands into fists to push their carts or are wrapping their coats about the cart handles, anything to minimize their exposure to the virus they imagine may be present there?
Or at the hint of sunshine, that paths and back roads grow thick with neighbors walking, happy to wave, many who ask how you are doing, even if you have never seen them before?
Has your awareness expanded as to the absolute importance of all those anonymous clerks and grocery store workers and truckers who keep supermarkets stocked and thus prevent real panic from erupting?
Have you not given thought to all those restaurant workers, owners and employees at small businesses, self-employed dog trainers, salon and day care operators and on and on, occupations without end and how they are struggling?
Have you become more aware of the quiet, heroic nature of doctors and nurses and first responders?
Until a vaccine is widely available, can you imagine sitting in a packed movie theater, or close seated around a table at a busy restaurant or walking among throngs of kids at change of classes in a school?
I will stay away from a granular discussion of politics here, but are you not more conscious of the importance of good government, good leadership, scientists, public health, and medical care for all? Are you not more conscious of how some leaders’ ignorance, arrogance, lies and fantasies have fueled the spread of this virus?
Has the virus caused you to think deeply about how we measure the worth of one human life? Anywhere, regardless of country, government, race? Sickness separates but it also connects.
I think we are going to have to adapt to living with much more “negative capability,” that idea articulated by the poet John Keats of having to live in uncertainty and confusion and of having really no idea how the future will evolve. Perhaps only one reality can be said to be certain — normalcy, as we knew it, is gone.
