The Humbling

I feel humbled by the pandemic.   

In short, I am somewhat protected by the horrors of it all.    But I do watch the news and listen to NPR.  I am home every day with my children.  My four-year-old asks me frequently when he can do something we used to do and I start to tell him and he interrupts me and says, “I know, when the coronavirus is over.” 

On one hand, my husband and I are still employed.  We don’t have the coronavirus.  Though we live in a county with a fairly high number of cases, to my knowledge, I don’t know anybody who has had the virus.  Also, my husband does most of our shopping because he is a better shopper, so I am definitely living in a privilege bubble right now. 

I feel humbled because I until it happened, I thought we in the 21^st century were too technologically advanced to have an epidemic.  Teachers, news and maybe just general naivete led me to believe that the days of epidemics were behind us.  And though I remember SARS and heard about SARS as it was going on, I was working in environment closed off from the world at the time and it seemed like Asia and Toronto’s problem, not something that could happen here.  

I thought our hygiene was better and therefore we were living in a different world than when the days of the smallpox, yellow fever, influenza epidemics. 

Even when it was first starting, I didn’t believe that things would go like this.  Even when my work closed for two weeks, until the end of March, I believed by the beginning of April things would be getting back to normal again.  

So I guess this was a surprise for me and for all of us. 

I find the coronavirus pandemic humbling because many people I know are out of work, in that either they have formally been laid off or their work has dried up for the time being.  Weekly, I hear stories from my coworkers who live by themselves and are having a hard time with the isolation.   

I hear stories of people on the radio or online of people who are really in a bad way with Covid-19 because they or someone that they know is very sick. 

It is humbling to be taken down a notch because the life that we lived on January 1, 2020 seems like a very different world than the life that we live now. 

Yet, this current reality is also humbling in some interesting ways too right now. 

On Monday night, I took a walk by myself after dark and I felt scared while walking behind the strip mall parking lot that is near my house.  Normally, I wouldn’t have been as afraid walking at night through the parking lot because I might have seen the cars of the people who work at the strip mall parked in the lot.  I might have been the employees leaving for the evening. I might even have seen a delivery truck bringing supplies to the pizza place.  Probably on a regular Monday evening, there would have been the noise of life humming in the background. But that night, the lot was completely empty and quiet expect for the sound of the wind. As I walked, I kept feeling suspicious that people might be hiding in the dark unlit corners of the lot.  In the afternoons recently, I have seen some teenagers hanging out on the loading docks of the grocery store that has been vacant since last January. I reasoned that people stuck at home might be running out of things to do, so there might be more people up to malfeasance.  But that is not how my walk went. 

I was jumpier than normal, but besides the family I saw a few streets over from the stripmall, on their porch smoking and hanging out and the man I saw taking out his trash, I didn’t see very many people. Additionally, everyone who I did see seemed extremely happy to see me, even though I didn’t know them.  The people on the porch cracked a joke about how I was wearing a headlamp.  The man taking out his trash waved to me from across the street.   

I felt humbled on my walk, not only humbled by the quiet and lack of cars on the road by the friendliness of the people who I did encountered.  I saw a house that elaborately decorated for Easter even though this was such a strange year, and likely the occupants of this house had no guests for Easter. 

Connections are happening that might not have happened if we weren’t all in quarantine.  I feel humbled almost daily by the messages that I get from friends and family online.  For example, on Tuesday, I had a nice text exchange with an old friend who I haven’t had much contact with since he moved away in 2012.  On Easter, I spoke with my Grandmother, who while we exchange cards and presents, I haven’t talked to since last summer. 

After my last online trivia night, I reviewed the names of all the teams who played. It warmed my heart that I saw names of some of the teams who played at my in-house library trivia nights alongside the names of my friends, family members and people who I didn’t know. 

Also, while it has been challenging to find activities to entertain my young sons every day, I feel as though we are growing together as a family.  My children and I are becoming more comfortable with staying home, which is something that I had a hard time doing before.  We are also learning to follow our own cues as to what activities we will do next.  We are all becoming comfortable with being a little bored because that is how great ideas emerge. 

One day, I drew this drawings with sidewalk chalk because I was out of entertaining small children ideas. The boys ended up making up their own game. I ended up being entertained myself.

The humbling is hard but in small ways it is making us all a little stronger and a little more resilient. 

How are getting by with being quarantined?