Nows and Forevers

I think about how different the world is today than it was three years ago, when we were still in lockdown in the state where I live, and having to come to terms with the fear of Covid-19 and the sudden and deep isolation.

One of the things that I heard from people, online and also in real life, was that they were taking it as a sabbatical. Lots of people, according to this Vox article, were taking that time to grow as people. Good for them. But it wasn’t my reality.

I have to say that the lockdown and the time that I’ve been working from home since this all started has been anything but a time of leisure: For the first several months I worked almost nonstop covering the pandemic for my journalism job and the rest of it was spent worrying about my family and the state of the world. And I didn’t have it even a fraction as bad as many of the other people working in the industries that I cover, health care and energy among them. They had to work, at great peril.

There wasn’t a lockdown for them.

I didn’t have time to write a novel, bake sourdough bread, or what have you. I was able to keep something of a journal of the lockdown time, though not as much as I would have wanted given time constraints. But I would have chronicled that time in my journal anyway, as I have pretty steadily since 1990 or so. I just didn’t have a lot of extra time on my hands.

And even if I did, I don’t think “King Lear” would have come out of my MacBook. I’m proud of the people who were able to turn this whole experience around. But, like the writer of this Vox article two years ago, I think surviving it in one piece is worth a lot, too.

There is one big difference between me now and me then, other than full vaccination status: I joined the many who learned a language. But I can’t even say that was because of Covid. I left Wales in January 2020 determined to learn Welsh, just as I did after being a kid leaving Montreal and being annoyed that I couldn’t understand what was going on around me. (Mission accomplished, even if I’ve forgotten most of it.) But lockdown and Covid actually got in the way. But by the end of 2020, with things settling into a heightened set of normalcy despite the pandemic, I was able to begin.

But it didn’t happen in those early months of the pandemic.