Year Three.

looking back, looking forward: a curriculum

What’s the last image on your camera roll before lockdown in March of 2020? This is mine.

Think about how it all began. 

Our family began pandemic lockdown a day before most of our region. On Thursday March 12, 2020, two of our three kids stayed home at our urging. Our third kid had a test and wanted to take it, which we thought would be OK. On Friday the 13th, everything closed down and stayed closed. My son, a sixth grader bound for middle school, spent his last elementary school recess not knowing it was his last elementary school recess.

That weekend, we had two couples over for drinks, food, and fire pit on the back deck. The mood was a combination of worry and bemusement. A couple of weeks, we told each other. We didn’t know the phrase “social distancing” as we sat in a tight circle of patio chairs. The gathering was an act of willful denial, of getting away with something, of skirting risk. Like those people in the action movies who barely escape in a speeding car before everything blows up behind them. 

Soon, packets of enrichment activities would arrive in the mail courtesy of the school district, chipper worksheets with math problems and thinking questions. There were so many efforts like this. The pitching in, the improvised creativity and care. When I walked the John Muir Way in Scotland last summer, I was perusing the website for the John Muir Birthplace Museum in Dunbar and found 100 nature-based activities kids could do at home. Someone wrote those, uploaded them, in those early pandemic days. Reading through them in 2022 felt like picking through an abandoned building, dust on the furniture, an ancient overturned coffee mug.

It seems like a long time ago.
Three years is a fifth of my youngest’s life, but only 1/17 of mine.

Recount how perversely simple life was.

We listened for the full answer when we asked someone “how are you?” We laughed together at how inane the question sounded.

We made do with what was right around us, because the thing we thought we couldn’t live without was on a cargo ship somewhere. 

Clapped and cheered on the balcony at 7 each night.
Wore the mask wherever we went, which was bizarrely easier than the later stages of pandemic, with all its endless calculations of whether one was necessary. 
Talked to family every week, ideally on video. 
Tended to the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid. 
Stayed home. Stayed alive. 

Perversely simple did not mean easy.

Let yourself remember.

Probe your memory if you dare, like the cold sore you can’t resist poking with your tongue to see if it’s still there. It is. 

Some memories are workaday: the color-coded U.S. and world maps, the tables and line graphs on whatever site became your trusted favorite. You analyzed the trendline like it was a note from a middle school crush. 

Some memories are fanciful. The Christmas lights with which people re-adorned their homes. The kind popup podcasts teaching us creative ways to cook that quarantine pasta. The dog balloons that got stuck on the ceiling. The Zoom company meeting, also with dogs:

Our pets saved us, it would seem–dogs forced us to walk each day, cats beckoned us to nap in soft clothes.

Some memories are bittersweet. The makeshift junior prom, the aborted trip home for Thanksgiving. The cake on day 50, and day 250. 

Remember wiping down your groceries, or putting them in the corner like a disobedient child in time out. Bad Pop Tarts! 

Remember that life continued, layers on top of layers. Good things, yes, and terrible things with horrible alacrity. George Floyd. “Murder hornets.” The insurrection. Bucha. Uvalde.

Church folk, permit yourself to be wistful about Zoom worship. The ingenuity of the pastor to turn a favorite salad bowl into a makeshift baptismal font. Scrounging the kitchen for the last finger of Walker’s shortbread and a half-drunk bottle of Powerade: the bread of heaven and cup of new life. The delectable glimpses into people’s living rooms or bedrooms, the prayer concerns that poured into chat, the little old people with only the tops of their heads visible on their iPads, the telltale yellow outline around someone’s square when their squawking side conversation drowned out the preacher. I like an app that narcs on you.

Glimpse how much has changed.

The big things–for me, a third book and a high school graduate and a walk across Scotland and a third cat and a pastoral position–and some that aren’t as obvious, like almost all of my coaching clients are comfortable on Zoom now. This newsletter wasn’t weekly until covid, which we called the coronavirus at first. I like TV more than movies these days: more stretching out in a story, more stretching out on my couch.

Hybrid everything now. 

Actually staying home when one is sick rather than powering through. Why did we ever do that?

More people invoking the word trauma, which seems mainly to highlight how poorly equipped we are to deal with it, how poorly set up for human tenderness and healing. But we have to start somewhere.

Sort through your stuff.

It’s weird what I want to keep and what I want to fling as far away as possible, these relics of the last three years. I still have all the cloth masks, long after omicron deemed them wholly inadequate. A wall remains studded with command hooks for our KN95s, but most hooks are empty–my vigilance is no longer quite so necessary, which is good because I can’t do it any more. I’m a warrior gone soft. Do your best, but what will be will be. You’re not in control.

More stuff: The at-home date-night boxes Robert and I shared each month: the sushi-making kit, the “casino night.” The shelf cluttered with kits that kept my kid busy. Electric pencil sharpener. Tabletop ping pong game. Mechanical calendar that hasn’t been flipped to a new date since a Thursday in December. Not sure which December; there have been three of them.

Sort through the questions, too:

What do you know now that you’re glad to know?
What do you know that pains you? That we can get used to a million deaths. That the immunocompromised are still in the thick of this while the world moves on.
What’s your most precious artifact from the last three years?
And which one can you not wait to get rid of, or already discarded with great relish? 
What’s different for you now?

Ponder what it means for something to “end.” 

To the people saying the pandemic is over, I sometimes want to say, “Must be nice.” In many ways it is. Of course it is. And yet. I read this week Gabor Maté’s views on addiction. Addiction is alluring because it’s so difficult to let go of something that almost works. So much of the “normal” we’re going “back to” seems fully operational but isn’t. 

During my first trip to Trader Joe’s after lockdown, I was flooded with love for these random strangers with their T-shirt masks and their wide berths around one another. It was Merton-esque, this vision of belovedness. I had a crazy irrational wish that when this was over, we could have a big massive group hug (those of us who wanted one), all of us who survived with our humanity intact, which I prayed would be as many of us as possible. I wanted to dance in the streets and embrace total strangers and weep.

But it didn’t end that way. There was no V-E Day. Pandemics peter out, a decrescendo, not a cymbal crash. So we didn’t get the catharsis we needed. But maybe that’s OK too. Maybe a stark before and after doesn’t suit us. Because I’d like to take our gentleness, our fragility, and slide into what’s next.

Anyway. 
You made it. Millions didn’t make it, but you did. 
You made it, even if you’re still learning what the “it” is.

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I’ll be hosting a Zoom conversation for paid subscribers on Thursday, March 23 at 7 p.m. EDT, to talk through this three-year milestone: our lessons learned and the questions that remain. Special guest will be my friend, the great and good Sarah Scherschligt, Lutheran pastor and author of God Holds You: A Pandemic Chronicle. Join us for a thoughtful, hopeful conversation–recording will be available afterward if you can’t make it live. Free subscribers can upgrade for as little as $5 for one month; comped subscriptions are available for those who need them, and members and friends of Trinity Presbyterian in Herndon receive gift subscriptions upon request. 

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What I’m Up To

Podcast News: We have a bonus episode of the Blue Room podcast this week, a conversation with author and anti-oppression consultant Sandhya Jha. Sandhya is a wise and effervescent human and I think you’ll love the conversation. Also, Hope: A User’s Manual was recently featured on an episode of the Daily Edify podcast, and in a recorded YouTube conversation. 

Ted Talk: my latest Ted Lasso post is up, a recap and theme conversation about season two. 

And my installation as associate pastor at Trinity Pres, Herndon will be this Sunday March 12 at 3 p.m. EDT, in person and livestreamed. 

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Link Love

After last week’s post, one of you asked for a video of our kitten chasing the rainbow prisms. Here you go! (Though she’s actually chasing the reflection from Robert’s watch)

Steady on.