Today is the fifth anniversary of the start of the pandemic. On this day five years ago, I closed the studio.
You know how there are those days you will never forget where you were and what you were doing when they happened?
9/11 is one of them for a lot of us. I was sitting at the breakfast table, scribbling morning pages with a cat on my lap, when G called and told me to turn on the TV.
When The Challenger Spacecraft blew up, I was spooning apple sauce into my two-year-old’s mouth as she sat in her high chair.
The day JFK was shot, I was sitting in 4th grade when Sister Michelle went to the classroom door to receive a message and then ran, crying, out of class.
But the pandemic was different. Nothing blew up, and nobody got shot. It was more stealthy and trickier to figure out. We couldn’t see the virus itself, only the panic in those hospital workers’ tired eyes behind their hazmat headgear. This was a lot scarier in many ways.
On the morning of March 13, 2020, I bought an expensive piece of yoga software called Namastream that would allow me to live stream my yoga classes into students’ computers. I had no idea what that meant or how to do it, but something told me I would have to learn.
I taught Happy Hour Yoga that afternoon and, at the end of class, announced I was closing. For a while. To flatten the curve.
Nobody knew what would happen, but that day there was a cascade of closings, and Zoom became our way of life. The world was now under house arrest.
I wasn’t all that unhappy about this, frankly. I had dreamed about being sequestered in a space where all my survival needs were met, but I didn’t have to interact with any people. Being an introvert, I find interacting with people exhausting, and I need time after social events to recover. I regularly schedule silent retreats and love nothing more than a long afternoon, a swaying hammock, and a fat novel.
But on Day 49 of the pandemic, I found myself writing this:
And now, here I am, in my dream scenario, except it’s not anything the way I dreamed. I feel untethered, floating in amber, or more accurately, my bathrobe.
I haven’t washed my hair in a while and my scalp is becoming a science experiment. I’m not organizing, or making sourdough, or learning the ukulele.
What I am doing is accumulating microphones and halogen lamps. I’m learning how to look into a camera lens so it looks like I’m looking at you.
In the past 50 days, I’ve garnered enough technological acumen to put all my yoga classes online. I am now fluent in Zoom and even have a paid account.
And I’m doing this consciously and deliberately, almost desperately, because I’m afraid of losing the people I want to go to lunch with, and have a beer with, and have conversations with after yoga when this is over.
I’m doing this because I’m now realizing that without those people, my life doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t have a purpose. Without this little community who I love, I don’t know who I am.
I used to think the person I was in my relationships was a very small part of who I really was. I used to think who I really was the person I encountered in solitude.
But this quarantine has shown me that that’s only partly true. As it turns out, without my little tribe, solitude has no point. I need solitude to appreciate my friends, and my friends to appreciate solitude. I need them both equally for my life to make sense, to have meaning.
In this newfound pandemic landscape, new work has sprouted for me. I am not growing blueberries, but I am trying to be a good farmer and keep my tribe cultivated, protected, and fed.
For the past sixteen years, they have fed, protected, and supported me. I believe if we can all huddle super-close now (albeit online) when this is over, we’ll still know each other. We won’t need to reconnect because we’ll have never lost our connection, to begin with
My dream is when this is over, we’ll step out of our individual solitudes, walk across the vast prairies of our isolation, unfurl our yoga mats like picnic blankets, and gorge together on the precious harvest of our love.
It’s now five years later, and the pandemic is over. There are live studio classes again, which are also streamed to members in Florida, Wisconsin, and other non-local living rooms, bedrooms, and beaches.
But just as 9/11 is still reverbing through the culture, so is the pandemic. The pandemic changed us as people and as a culture. My naive vision of meeting again, unfurling our mats, and picking up where we left off hasn’t been realized. I feel we are all sadder somehow and guarded around each other. We have to sniff each other out as to our political affiliations and watch our words. People seem quicker to anger, blame, and judge.
I don’t know what to do about this. I don’t know how to be in the world. Part of me wants to sequester again. To hunker down, meditate, read, be alone. But I saw my first robin today. And G’s team practiced on their field for the very first time since last fall. Spring is in the air. And I feel like doing something vigorous and challenging like a 30-day Yoga Challenge. I want to feel renewed and hopeful and energized. But it feels too early, too unsafe in some way. Is the coast clear? Will the coast ever be clear again?
I don’t know.
Inspiration Location 