Sunday, September 13, 2020

9:00 AM | Some of What I’ve Learned, Some of What I Know Now

Sometime last March, I had a startling—you could say, existential—question, and realization, that was sharpened by the vertigo of what was then an encroaching pandemic: What if you don’t believe in what you’re doing anymore?

This was the first thing I learned: sweeping world events that obscure the future, and render to tatters all the constants that you know will leave you unmoored. They take all that you are, and interrogate you with questions you really have no answer for. Was the life you led the life you really wanted to have? Do you now yearn for things you never knew you yearned for? In a world come undone, what is your purpose?

I’ve been a teacher for almost twenty years. Is this still me?

The second thing I learned is that the distance between myself and the moon is roughly 42 folds of a piece of paper. Just 42 folds—imagine that—scaling what should be almost unfathomable distance. This knowledge is also trivia, but like many inconsequential things in our lives, knowing this factoid feels like comfort, like a signpost to life’s mysteries.

But you also know all signs are arbitrary, and most mean nothing.

The third thing I learned is that the quarantine has done the impossible—it has made me a morning person. I’ve found that I like the easy, unfettered silence of dawn. But being a morning person is in constant battle with the insomnia the anxieties of this year have wrought. It took a while to get back to the early morning rhythm I had back in July. The dreadful embrace of insomnia all throughout August almost did me in, but I’m back to waking early again, and in communion with a kind of quiet I’ve come to love: it feels like I’m alone in the universes, and it is a womb, and I’m granted respite from a world gone mad. I hope this lasts.

The fourth thing I’ve come to know for sure is that I could cry at the drop of a hat these days, at the slightest provocation, and mostly from small acts of kindness. Or from stories that move me. It is the weirdest thing, how when the world feels so tight and suffocating, our emotions become adrift in an uncharted ocean so large I can’t even recognize what’s joy or what’s pain.

I, too, thought I could weather well the lockdown’s early months. But it got under my skin so thoroughly. I know I am not alone in feeling this desperation, almost at the edge of a breakdown. And it has taken an immense effort to rise from all that, which only really waxed for real on my birthday weekend last August, thanks to the ministrations of the beloved. I found a breakthrough through him—“Just open up and don’t push people away, you can ask for help, you know, you don’t have to do everything alone,” he said during one of my darkest moments—and I’ve made some efforts following his prescription, which also had a weird side effect: it has made me very emotional, and with every catharsis I’d have I’d cry at the drop of a hat.

The fourth thing I learned is that sometimes I can’t tell the difference between hunger pangs and an anxiety attack.

The fifth thing I learned is that I like online class. But online class also means cats on the prowl jumping on someone’s lap, dog sounds sometimes mistaken for a baby crying, [sometimes the sound of a baby crying when there is no baby at all], frozen faces captured in mid-blink, voices chopped up they sound Chinese, the househelp suddenly streaking across the screen, a faceless avatar [“My camera is not working, sir”], the whirr of distant chainsaw, an archipelago in one Zoom call, the disembodied din of everything in a submarine, the professor in short shorts striving for meaning—bridging distance and hoping the lesson arrives fully in the pods of each one’s anxious seclusion.

The sixth thing I learned is the anchor of the following virtues: purpose, gratitude, humility, consistency, talent, and love. All of these in that order altogether is going to be my mantra from now on if I have to survive the emotional roller coaster ride of this pandemic.

The seventh thing I learned, and this is not the last, is that I’ve decided to take 2020 the way it also invites me to take it: “20/20,” a sharpening of vision, of forging a new path from the comfortable blindness of old. Crisis is also opportunity [but please make no mention of that misinterpreted Chinese word you’ve read about in self-help books]. I’m not discounting the hardships of most people today, but I’m staking this as my narrative.

Beginning, again.

Labels: life

[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich

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