After COVID?
Sadie and Dougie
My family and I just decided to adopt these dogs from a rescue shelter. During our call with a representative of the shelter, she asked us: “After COVID, how much time will you be spending away from home all at once?”
The question makes sense in the context of training a new pet.
But in it lives the assumption that there is, in fact, an “after-COVID,” where everything returns to the way things were.
I wonder: “Will my husband and I continue working from home?” “Will the kids be returning to school in person?” and “Will we ever live in a world free from the constant fear of infectious disease?”
I’m not sure how I feel about continuing to work from home. I am worried about my kids returning to school in person, as I don’t think it’s possible to do that safely in a country without a vaccine, with inadequate testing and ICU capacity, and where citizens are not uniformly willing to wear masks. But the last question is what really got me thinking about what it might mean if the answer is “no.”
COVID isn’t the first deadly pandemic this world has ever seen and it most likely won’t be the last. On the one hand, it seems impossible for us humans to adapt to a reality where there is a grave but unpredictable threat to our health that refuses to obey anyone’s rules or timelines. On the other hand, we have to figure out how to adapt or it will truly make us miserable.
Feeling unmoored by fear often brings me to practice acceptance.
In a visualization exercise I experienced years ago at a workshop for Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), my colleagues and I were asked to bring to mind a personal struggle that had been a part of us most of our lives. We pictured ourselves with this trait early in childhood. We then visualized how it inhabited our present lives. Slowly, we imagined bringing this difficulty with us into the future—decade by decade—until we were close to death. Here I was, on my imagined deathbed, hand-in-hand with this long-standing struggle. It was a jarring realization and I resisted it. But it was also freeing. I didn’t have to get rid of unwanted parts of myself to live with purpose. That’s the understanding I am coming to with COVID. Acceptance may be a path to healing.
In that vein, I’ve been thinking about ways to more fully embrace the difficulties brought about by current societal upheaval. By “embrace,” I don’t mean that I like it. What I do mean is that facing the reality of ongoing public health challenges and structural inequality allows me to engage creatively with the attempt to increase compassion in everyday life.
Like writing this blog, for example.
Writing this blog is one of the more difficult things I have ever done. Most of my life, I have hidden my pain in reading, schoolwork, and studying. Naturally, I became an academic. My knee-jerk response to any new idea that I come across, or think of myself, is to do a literature review to glean evidence for its validity. Although I genuinely enjoy this process, it gets in the way when I am trying to tell a story or convey my authentic experience. Or when I’m trying to describe an inherently ineffable experience—like compassion. This kind of writing is the antithesis of academic discourse. It requires listening carefully to oneself and to others. It acknowledges the many ways of creating and sharing knowledge. I am learning lately just how extensively academic gatekeeping has silenced the voices of communities of color, indigenous peoples, the LGBTQ+ community, women, immigrants, and the disabled community.
COVID has been a wake-up call for me in so many respects. I wholeheartedly hope we develop an antidote both for this disease and for social inequity. But we don’t have to wait until “after COVID” to bring about a more just and compassionate world.
