Waiting for Normal: Trying to Find Meaning in a World Put on Hold

Cat DeLaura, May 2020

7 a.m. The alarm goes off, and I’m out of bed. Some days the new normal of the coronavirus pandemic is easy. The days feel empty in a full-of-fresh-starts and new hobbies and endless-amounts-of-time kind of way. 

11 a.m. A call alerts authorities to a pair of trucks full of rotting bodies outside a funeral home in Brooklyn. “I ran out of space,” said Andrew T. Cleckley, the owner, when asked. The funeral industry is not prepared to handle this many corpses. 

Other days my alarm remains on snooze for hours. “What’s the point of getting up?” I ask myself. The neighbors yelling at their kids, the pitter patter of the early morning jogger, the rising warmth of the waking sun, which by midday will bake this little studio apartment. It will all be here tomorrow. And the next day, and the next.  

“This morning a patient was really sick,”said  Christine Ziobro, a nurse in a COVID-19 unit in New York City who was quoted by The New York Times. “And she’s dying alone and here I have to make the choice of whether or not I take an extra 10 minutes in the room with my P.P.E. on holding her hand, or just letting her die alone.” To wake with her alarm or snooze the morning away is not a luxury she is afforded.

For me, as I’m sure it is with many around the country and globe, the coronavirus is a vague abstraction. Over one million infected in the United States as of today, and now over 80,000 deaths. The Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington now predicts over 130,000 deaths by August. That’s nearly 15,000 more than the number of Americans who died in World War I. There are horror stories from the hard-hit hospitals of New York or Louisiana, gruesome tales of large numbers of nursing home deaths around the country. But for me, all I see day after day is my unchanged neighborhood. Even the feel-good tales of neighborhoods coming together to sing or cheer on health care workers from a distance haven’t occurred anywhere near where I live. Rather, last night our neighbor threatened to call the cops when another resident’s dog wouldn’t stop barking. 

But considering only 0.31% of the population has been infected by the virus, it makes sense that the majority of us are living our lives monumentally impacted by it, but not witnessing any of the horror up close. I know no one who has COVID-19, much less anyone who has died from it. 

Instead it feels like seeing photos of a war on another continent. They may evoke emotions or reactions from you, but they are not visceral or real. What is visceral is the day-to-day doldrums, staring at the same four walls and watching the wildflowers in a jar on the kitchen table wilt a little more every day. It doesn’t feel like a crisis so much as if someone up above put the world on pause and we’re all just waiting for them to turn it back on again. 

It is too easy to see this as an interim, a break while I wait for life, normal life — real life — to begin again. But I remind myself there is no other life to which I will return some day. This is life. So how do I convince myself that these are holy and heavy days, laden with import and meaning?

There is a concept in rhetoric called the kairotic moment, this brief moment of opportunity that you must seize upon before it passes. The idea comes from Kairos, the Greek god of opportunity. He often appears with winged feet, standing on a ball or wheel to represent his unpredictability. And, importantly, as he approaches, he sports a long forelock of hair that can be easily grasped, but from behind his head is bald. 

“Because none whom I have once raced by on my winged feet will now, though he wishes it sore, take hold of me from behind,” he explains in an epigram the Ancient Greek poet Posidippus wrote for a bronze statue of the god. 

Kairos is often portrayed as this single, pivotal moment. It cruelly arrives and swiftly leaves, and those who hesitate miss it forever. I try to see this time, as slow and unending as it seems, as our kairotic moment. I know that no matter how long it seems in the moment, it will pass in a rush as normal comes roaring back to life on the far end. But right now, this time is pregnant with opportunity and possibility and is not merely life put on pause. So how do we not only make sense of it, but also take advantage of its possibility as we are cloistered away from our world? 

I believe to do so we have to, one, see our lives in the context of the role they play in the bigger picture. What we choose to do affects far more than just ourselves. Two, we can’t be passive observers, sleeping while the world changes. Now more than ever is the time for action. And three, we can’t just approach this as a break from life. We have to see this time as just as important and meaningful as the normal we so desperately wish to return to.

“When adapting to life during a crisis, acknowledging the challenging circumstances as forming one’s real life now is essential. Yet one should simultaneously remember that one is doing one’s utmost to return to a better, pre-crisis style of living,” writes Godelinde Gertrude Perk in her article “Coronavirus: Advice from the Middle Ages for How to Cope With Self-Isolation.” 

Perk compares our current stay-at-home orders to the religious isolation practices of the anchorites. Anchorites were most common during the late Middle Ages across Britain and continental Europe, although a form of their practice continues today. They were most often women who would wall themselves into a small cell attached to a church building. The cells would often have three windows: one to observe mass from, one to receive food and pass waste out of, and one open to the outside world, often these last windows would face busy streets in the center of town. 

The purpose of an Anchorite’s life was to focus on God. They spent most of their days in prayer, reading and contemplating. But they were also fixtures of community life, listening to people’s concerns and giving out advice. And some texts suggested that sometimes they also doubled as banks, post offices, or “storehouses of local gossip.” 

Of course, none of us willingly chose our isolation, but the parallels still exist. Perk explains how anchorites were taught “to remind [themselves] that [they were] enclosed not just for [their] own benefit, but for the sake of others too.” They held their community up in prayer, a sacrificial role for the sake of the others. We too are now self-isolating for the sake of our communities. Perk writes that it might be more helpful to see our current situation not as a comfy staycation, but as a difficult, sacrificial service. We are the defenders of our friends and families, our cities and countries. Our isolation becomes a holy calling in the defense and protection of life.  

That’s one way to make sense of it, to imbue a life stripped of its usual purpose with meaning, but it requires an active effort. And sometimes a holy calling isn’t enough to pacify the daily doldrums. Sometimes recognizing a holy calling is far above what I am capable of. Sometimes it’s just enough for me to figure out what is for dinner.

“Change is a thing one sleeps through when young,” wrote my favorite author Christian Wiman, in a poem entitled “After the Diagnosis.” The line often repeats itself in my head, usually when I am struggling to wake. “Change is a thing one sleeps through.” 

It’s the fear of missing Kairos as he passes. And I am terrified of that, of sleeping through these events that will possibly irrevocably change my world. I don’t mean the literal sleep, the kind that I struggle to shake in the morning. I mean a mental sleep. I mean failing to notice life as it changes, failing to grasp the importance of that moment, failing to learn anything from it. I am willing to accept my inability to control the events occurring, but I am scared of regretting this strange time as an opportunity wasted.

My friend, Ruthie, argues that now is not the time to make sense of this moment. She and her husband spent this past year at various artist residencies across the country until COVID-19 hit and shut the world down. Now they are renting an Airbnb in Arizona, plotting their next step. 

“I think the most important thing to do right now is to simply live the experience,” she wrote in a blog post recently. “Rather than trying to make sense of it. As time goes on, we will know how to create and write about what we have experienced, but for now, our job is to sit in it and to love those around us. There is something restful, I think, and immensely comforting in the reminder that we do not have to make sense of anything right now.” 

While my instincts crave some way of making sense of this moment, of learning from it even as I live it, some way to take advantage of it, I also have to admit that I am incapable of doing so on any but the most simplistic level. What can I offer in explanation right now? The moment is too abstract, too conceptual, too abnormal. Grief, a death, these I know how to process. A thing is, and then it is no more, and you wrestle with the absence. But this being and not being, this moment of historical change while your day remains monotonously the same, how does one make sense of that? 

It feels uncannily like when my mother was in the hospital. She was diagnosed with breast cancer when I was a freshman in college. A year and a half later, at the end of my sophomore year, she was hospitalized because of complications. We spent the summer on the Malibu coast watching her fight against the disease, dying, but not yet dead. We knew death was coming, and that death was a better alternative to the shadow life she lived, hooked on breathing tubes and feeding tubes. But we couldn’t wish that death upon her or will it to come faster. We had to live through the hard interim. 

In that interim it felt like time stopped. Not just time, but life. We spent our time between happy moments in the pool with friends who came to be with us and painful hours beside her hospital bed. Everything that had made sense, or seemed meaningful, lost its meaning. We knew there was a normalcy that life would return to up ahead, and there was a normal life from which we had passed into this life of waiting rooms and intensive care units. But even while knowing that was our past and would be our future, it was no help in making sense of the present. 

Maybe this analogy isn’t quite right, at least not for those of us who currently aren’t affected by the virus. I certainly don’t feel the mental and emotional anguish I felt at that time. This interim, in some respects, is incomparable to that. But it is the only other time when life truly felt outside of life. The only other time when I couldn’t remember why the decision-making and the 10-year plans and the bill-paying and the social expectations were supposed to be important. 

I still go through the steps now: breakfast, exercise, online classes, grocery shopping. I even occasionally think about the future. Update my resume, apply to an internship, look at courses offered next semester. But everything wears a film of disconnect. I remain distant from the outside world no matter how many zoom chats or conference calls I am on. 

When I was younger, a family friend took me and my sisters camping in the Weminuche Wilderness in southwest Colorado every other summer. He insisted we leave behind all clocks and phones and anything else connecting us with the outside world. It wasn’t hard to leave them behind, to trade them for the fresh smell of pine needles and campfire conversations. But I always had this low-lying fear that we would emerge from our forest retreat to find our world unalterably changed. A second 9/11, the start of a new world war, a global pandemic, and we would have slept and eaten and climbed mountains oblivious to those monumental moments of history.

There was an opinion piece by Charlie Warzel in The New York Times published in mid-March telling the story of a group of rafters who experienced that exact scenario. On Feb.19, they set out on a 25-day rafting trip through the Grand Canyon. When they finally left the river and an old man told them the tale of a world dramatically changed, they thought he was merely pulling their leg. Plummeting stock market? Professional sports suspended? Schools closed indefinitely? No one could have predicted any of it would happen when the rafters first went out on the river. I am jealous of the blissful 25 days of ignorance that group experienced. But I also still feel a little bit like the camper in the woods cut off from the world, unsure of what reality she will find when she finally emerges. 

Non-stop news updates make me painfully aware of the global situation as I habitually check my go-to social media platforms. But communication with my community feels drastically cut off. Friends I once saw daily I now have to remember to text to learn how they’re doing. Regulars I served coffee to every morning at the cafe I worked at, I now have no way of contacting or learning how they are doing. I have seen only three people with any consistency over the past six weeks — my two roommates and my partner. I had a community I regularly interacted with of close friends and casual acquaintances, classmates, and the bartenders at my favorite restaurants, and within a weekend I was virtually cut off from all of them. And I don’t know how much of that community will be there when this ends. Already one friend has plans to move to Boston for a new job over the summer. Bars and restaurants around town are shuttering their doors for good. What will be waiting for us at the end of this?

Even as restaurants begin to reopen and the city tries to return to some semblance of normal there is no community to return to. I still remain sequestered at home, as do most of my friends. And if we don’t, the models suggest the horror tales from epicenters like New York may not be too different from our own. Normal begins to feel further and further away. 

Like the article comparing our situation to anchorites, there has been a slew of publications that look to astronauts for comparison and advice in navigating our new normal. Astronauts in the International Space Station will spend months on end in the orbiting station that is roughly the size of a six-bedroom house. Confined within its walls, it is their home, work, gym, public gathering space, everything, much like our homes have become for us in this time. A common theme emerges through many of the pieces — the eager awaiting of that final touchdown when they return to earth, to normal, and how that sustains them. 

NASA astronaut Nicole Scott reflects in a video op-ed on The New York Times website: “Let me tell you, nothing beats that first hug after landing. It reminded me of what normal feels like. What life is supposed to be like.” 

We don’t know when our return to normal is going to happen. Unlike a space crew there is no date set for when we get to go back to normal, but there is normal again out there in the future. There will be a time when we can cover each other in hugs and kisses and share germs without fears of killing one another. And we can hold onto the hope of that future and look forward to it, while not giving up on this time either. 

I believe and hope there is much we can take the time in this interim to consider about our world, about how we hope to see it changed or revitalized now and on the far side of this. I hope we won’t be left grabbing at empty air as the opportunities here pass us by. 

In Greek and Roman mythology, the god of opportunity is often accompanied by the silent, shadowy figure Metanoia. At her most basic level she represents regret: “I am the goddess who exacts punishment for what has and has not been done, so that people regret it.” But there is more to the idea of metanoia than regret. In her article “Metanoia and the Transformation of Opportunity,” Kelly A. Myers wrote: 

When kairos and metanoia are approached as a learning process, kairos expands beyond the single, crucial moment of opportunity and into a longer view of human experience. In this longer view, kairos can be seen as a series of opportunities occurring over time, experienced with a range of exhilaration and regret. Rather than placing emphasis on isolated moments and available means, metanoia encourages broader consideration of the ways in which people move through experiences. More specifically, metanoia requires that a person look back on past decisions in order to move in a new direction. It calls for a larger process of revision in which a person is constantly revising and revitalizing understanding.

Part of what we learn from this pandemic will only be fully realized by reflection later. Regret and guilt will only be part of the experience of that reflection, and hopefully only a small part. As Myers argues, the “emotional response that comes with reflection is often a motivating force that leads to a transformation.” While we may miss our opportunity for change in the thick of this, the possibility of transformation will always be open to us, if we are willing to take the time to reflect.

My partner and I spent most of last night talking and crying, asking the hard questions of our future I had been ignoring. A friend called to ask if I could watch her dog while she is out of town. There’s a growing pile of donations to take to Goodwill in my bedroom. Already life is moving forward, returning to aspects of normal, of planning and juggling schedules. And in some ways, it already feels more overwhelming than the shutdown.