Wanting To Get Back To Normal During A Pandemic Is Not Normal.
It isn’t rational. It isn’t logical. It is the farthest thing from critical thought one could imagine. And yet, too many people simply cannot grasp that life as we knew it before is gone. Yesterday isn’t coming back. And today is the day we have to accept that if we want to have any chance of some sort of normal tomorrow.
This isn’t temporary. I know you want it to be. I know you’re tired of staying in and anxious for your children and bored with baking and miss shopping and afraid the economy will continue to spiral and your business — that you worked so hard for — will be gone. And it’s a hard pill that we have to swallow: things are going to die. Things we saved for and scraped for and invested ourselves into… they are going to be buried deep below, a casualty of a contagion that is taking lives as well.
Your children aren’t in school. You don’t have the morning commute. You and your person are suddenly surrounded by just each other and walls you painted that perfect hue are now barriers that won’t let you be the person you were before.
Before is gone.
That’s scary and uncertain and a frightening path to navigate if normal is what you depend on.
“But we cannot live in fear,” you mutter. Oh yes we can. We absolutely can. Fear is the most rational emotion we should have during a pandemic. Fear is the sane, sober decision we need right now. We are supposed to be afraid. Because if we aren’t afraid then we won’t care about the danger. And if we aren’t afraid of the danger then we die — or we kill someone else.
“That’s a little dramatic,” you think as you roll your eyes. No it isn’t. It’s a fact based on evidence. Current estimates are that we have lost over 690,000 lives across the globe in less than 8 months. That’s fast. Most preventable. Mothers, fathers, grandparents, children, friends. Gone. Because not enough people were afraid early on and too many people aren’t afraid at all right now.
The cruel irony is that people are more afraid of fear than this virus. I get that. We’ve been trained to see fear as irrational as if those two terms are mutually exclusive. We aren’t taught to embrace fear, unless it’s touring a haunted house on Halloween or riding a roller…
