Greetings, fellow Late Bloomers! I’m baaaaack…
As I hope a few of you noticed, I’ve been relatively silent for much of 2021. I spent most of the year finishing a draft of my forthcoming book: Delayed Onset Living: Notes from a Late Bloomer, which I hope to launch in the coming months. I thought it a good time, given the surge in hopes and dreams that tends to accompany a new year, to relaunch my blog with some thoughts about 2021.
Notwithstanding the suffering we all witnessed and heard about during the year, I still feel grateful to have lived through these tumultuous times. Like many of you, my family and I continued to struggle. But thankfully, whether due to obediently following CDC guidelines or just plain luck, none of us contracted the disease and we all heartily survived the mental and emotional challenges of continued separation and isolation. I also learned some stuff.
Like many of you, I thought we had survived the worst of the pandemic in 2020, as expressed in my last post. But this virus is nothing if not persistent. So, as new variants continue to circulate, my questions continue to mount. How vital is social connection? How real is the world we see through our chosen media outlet? Which habits are easy or difficult to maintain when, quite literally, no one is looking? What is normal?
For this post, I thought I’d try to answer some of those questions.
1. Solitude is not loneliness.
When vaccines became available in 2020 and the number of COVID cases began to drop, the media inundated us with images of family members weepily reuniting after months of separation. Those images were intended to emphasize the loneliness many of us experienced during the first year of the pandemic and to remind us that, now that things are “opening up,” it’s time to buy that plane ticket or send those flowers or otherwise consume. Remember, virtually everything you see on any media platform has been broadcast or uploaded to persuade you to purchase something.
Then came Beta, Delta, and most recently Omicron – increasingly contagious variants of this annoyingly persistent virus, which derailed our plans to reinstate our “normal” lifestyles. Back came the masks, the elbow bumps, the Zoom calls, and the Instacart deliveries. Also back was the politicization of the whole process, amplified by a growing frustration and general fatigue in the populace.
Yes, it’s true that humans crave social connection. The feeling of belonging to a group – that someone has your back – enhances our wellbeing. Still, despite the messages we see in the media, our desire for connection can be managed and the damage to our wellbeing from a lack of connection can be mitigated.
During both “phases” of this pandemic, my family has taken great care to follow the recommended guidelines for avoiding the virus. We wear masks whenever we venture out of our homes. We keep our distance. And we get tested whenever we suspect one of us might have been “exposed.” We do all this because each of us cares just as much, if not more, about the other members of our family than we do about ourselves. I know this kind of familial love isn’t unique, but it isn’t universal either. I’m profoundly grateful for it.
We don’t undertake these anti-viral protocols without some cost. I currently live alone and work from home. Consequently, I often go days without seeing or touching another person. I see people on Zoom, of course, and occasionally FaceTime with my kids and grandkids. But in-person contact has become increasingly rare.
I admit, despite my education and practice in the areas of wellness and mindfulness, I’ve indulged in a bit of loneliness during the last couple of years. Fortunately, one of the foundational pillars of “Delayed Onset Living” is the belief that we needn’t be emotional victims of happenstance – that we have the mental capacity to adapt to, and transcend, virtually any psychological challenge.
So that’s what I did. By engaging in the various mental and behavioral protocols I write about on this site, I found acceptance, I found calm, I found gratitude, and I found joy. I didn’t stop loving my family, or even stop missing them. But I remembered the difference between missing someone because it pains you to be alone and missing someone because you love them.
2. This too shall pass.
Impermanence is a lesson with which I was already quite familiar (“this too shall pass” was one of my mom’s favorite aphorisms). But our extended pandemic experience has certainly tested my faith in this idea. Both existential and practical questions will inevitably pop into my head during a lockdown. Will my test be positive? Will they cut my salary further? Will we ever get to eat inside again? Will we ever be able to hug again? Is this the end of civilization? Am I going to die? Will we ever be able to go to the mall again? (I don’t even like the mall.) Yet, for every night I lay awake, unable to sleep due to my incessant musings about what I might confront the next day, morning would come, my day would unfold, and I would survive each new challenge.
Life is more impermanent and less predictable than most of us understand or believe. Each morning we will awaken, or not, regardless of how intensely we worry about it. Each day will unfold as it will, inevitably defying our most cherished expectations. Therefore, it’s vitally important to develop your “letting go” muscle – especially your ability to let go of specific expectations and stressful ruminations. The ability to accept and surrender to what is, rather than regret what has happened or worry about what might happen, is one of the most valuable tools in your blooming toolbox.
3. Fear is fiction.
Of all our emotions, fear has evolved to cause the most suffering for the modern human. Back in the chatting-by-the-fire days, we feared a finite, identifiable collection of threats: lions, tigers, and bears (oh my), and maybe neighboring tribes trying to steal our food. Today, our fear is mostly ignited by worry, which is imaginary and generally destructive, and which is vulnerable to exploitation by governmental, media, and corporate manipulators.
To be clear, our startle response is real, evolved over millennia to help us dodge real dangers, like snakes popping out from under bushes. Fear, however – even our early, mostly warranted fear of those lions and bears – is not real. It’s part of the mental yarn we spin about a dangerous world and the appropriateness of our startle response and our resulting worry – the kind of fear that can be exploited by more powerful people and entities. Burglaries are up; buy this alarm. Heart disease is up; buy this weight loss supplement or join this gym. Street crime is up; buy this concealed weapon (and join the NRA). The pandemic is out of control; buy these masks, take these medicines, order this take-out, and watch these news programs.
The kind of fear so many of us have experienced during this pandemic, and are still experiencing, is the kind of fear worth exploring and learning to manage.
4. Gratitude is a powerful blooming tool.
I mentioned at the start of this post that I feel grateful to have experienced the historic personal and cultural upheaval that has accompanied this pandemic. Gratitude is one of my favorite tools for blooming, and this experience confirmed my faith in its effectiveness.
How (you might ask) can one be grateful for suffering? To be grateful for hardship doesn’t mean you’re a masochist – it doesn’t mean you would choose suffering over joy. In fact, we don’t choose our suffering at all. Even if COVID-19 were intentionally released from a lab in Wuhan (no evidence … yet), none of us chose to contract it or to suffer any of the numerous government-imposed preventative measures to avoid it. This pandemic happened. Our choices, then, are how we choose to feel about it and what actions we choose to take going forward. Do we repeatedly bemoan and relive the pain of our struggle long into the future? Or do we find lessons in our experience and, yes, give thanks for the benefits that derive from those lessons?
“What if,” you might ask, “I lost someone to the disease? How and why would you give thanks for that experience?”
That’s a poignant question and worthy of more discussion than I can offer in this article. For now, I will say that there are lessons to be gleaned even from the most heart-breaking experiences – lessons about resilience, about character, and yes, about gratitude for having shared even a moment of joy with the person you lost. Gratitude doesn’t eliminate heartbreak. But it can definitely help to mend a broken heart.
With that, I wish you all a Happy New Year! May 2022 bring you and yours health, happiness, fulfillment, and joy!