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On March 16th of 2020, I had a lunch meeting scheduled with a colleague.  We had planned to go to Subway and eat, and then go to her office for a more formal meeting with a third person, but she was running late, so I grabbed the sandwiches to go and just brought them to her office.

I often said in the year that followed that what should have been my last meal in a restaurant for more than a year still ended up being take out. I haven’t relaxed in any public indoors space for almost two years now, and 900,000 Americans are dead.

There isn’t much more I can say about that. I mean, there is a lot more I want to say, but my saying it won’t make things easier, or better, or even make me feel better. In fact, it just makes me angry, and I’m trying not to do that these days.

But here we are.

The Buddhists tell us that our suffering comes from our attachment to a preconceived idea of how things ought to be. That tracks for me: I’m not mad I’m having many Zoom meetings every week – I’m mad because I think things ought to be the way they were this time in 2020 – when lunch with a colleague didn’t require D-Day levels of planning, when you could meet someone new and ask them out to lunch without wondering if they were science deniers or anti-vaccine folks. I believe it ought to be that way, and I’m frustrated that it is not.

* * *

One thing I like about swimming is that I can’t do anything else while I’m swimming. I can’t listen to podcasts. I can’t check my email. I can’t listen to an audiobook. All I can do is swim. And think.

I had a Zoom meeting earlier today. One of dozens I have already had six weeks into this year, as we approach the 2-year anniversary of when the world shut down.

The first six weeks or so, back in March of 2020, was a blur. The hunt for toilet paper. Essential workers. Musicians performing from home. Worksheets sent home from school for The Boy, who was living with us at the time. Zoom lunches. Working out grocery delivery, teaching people how to Zoom. Figuring out how to do church.

If I’m honest, I enjoy a good crisis. I obviously don’t like that people are suffering, but in a crisis, priorities become clear, the haze and grey areas burn away, and it’s always clear what needs to be done next. In a not-crisis time, my ADHD muddled brain often has trouble with what should be done next, but a good crisis makes things clear.

Another thing I love about a crisis is that it moves things faster. Priorities become clear for others too, and so instead of having 27 meetings, we can get things done.

But the mundane, the everyday, the slog – that stresses me out. And now we have entered the stage of this thing where we are still in crisis, but it has become routine. Sure, thousands of people die every day from this virus, but here’s a late fee for your phone bill.

I was thinking about all of this today, while swimming up and back, up and back, up and back.

* * *

I think this is just what we do now. This is just how life is. Each day feels like a Sisyphean challenge – dodge the virus, avoid people, try to stay connected, try to keep people you love safe, try to be as normal as possible while being reminded dozens of times a day that there is nothing normal about this at all.

Because normal is just another word for whatever you are used to, and I’ve exerted a lot of energy trying to not get used to this.

Like many of you, a whole lot of my time and energy these days is being spent trying to figure out how to live in this new reality. How to earn a living as a community builder when people are vectors of the virus and your family is immune-compromised.  How to live with a brain that seeks variety when every damn day seems endless and repetitive. And trying to figure out, if this is what life is just like now, how to do it as well as you can, and in such a way as to bring hope to others as well.

I don’t have any answers. I am leaning in, though. I’m upgrading my office equipment – turning makeshift arrangements that have been cobbled together for the last 23 months into permanent features. I’m building new, virtual and distanced communities that didn’t exist before. I’m learning new skills that will be useful in whatever comes next. But mostly, I’m constantly trying to stay connected, to be creative, and to build a life in the midst of it all.

No Man’s Land

The pool at my gym is in a huge room, with a knotty pine ceiling, pierced by large, square skylights. The room is at least 20 feet tall, and the skylights are at least 15 feet across, so you feel like you are under the open sky if you look up. Or, if you are like me, prefer to swim the backstroke.

I say prefer there, like I have a quiver full of strokes available to me, but swimming is a skill I learned as an adult, so it’s pretty much backstroke, breaststroke, or sink. But it’s fine – I like the backstroke and the relaxed pace it forces upon me. It’s hard to stress about much when you are in the rhythm of the backstroke.

The guy in the lane next to mine, however, was doing the freestyle crawl, and he had lots of gear with him. He had a person who was timing his laps, and while I’m strolling along, leisurely stroking (Tickle, T, Touch. Tickle, T, Touch…), he is powering through. It’s obvious he is preparing for some form of competition.

I decidedly, am not. As I make my slow way down the lane, he passes me multiple times. Part of me feels some form of atavistic urge to accelerate,  some concern that he is doing better than I am, that he is somehow superior to me, somehow more masculine than I am.

As I swim down the lane, I am looking at the sky overhead – another reason I prefer the backstroke in this pool. The clear blue sky with traces of white clouds sail by, and the 25-meter pool has two and a half skylights under which I will pass as I swim each length. As the swimmer next to me flails past, I suppress the urge to push ahead, to be faster, to engage in some futile attempt at competition, and instead notice, high above, a jet airplane headed west, away from the airport.

I wonder briefly where they are headed, the people on that plane. Are they on a business trip, the fate of the account depending on their being sharp at the meeting to which they are headed? Is it for pleasure – perhaps a trip to see grandma, after almost two years apart because of COVID? Or an emergency trip home, because someone’s unvaccinated parent is about to be taken off the ventilator?

This passes through my head as I count my strokes, while Greg Louganis in the next lane is splashing for all he’s worth, and the time keeper shouts encouragement. I have to count my strokes, because this is not a pool designed for races, and thus has no row of flags near the end of the swim lane. Which means that if you lose yourself in your thoughts while doing the backstroke, you will smash your head into the wall of the pool.

As a person with ADHD, I have before described my inner monologue as actually like being in the electronics department at a store, where there is a wall of televisions, but all with the volume up and all tuned to different channels. At times I can tune into one, while the others drift into the background, but it always requires concentration to do, and if I relax too much, it all becomes just noise.

So here I am, counting my strokes – I hit the wall somewhere between 21 and 23, so at 21 I become careful. But while I’m counting my strokes, I’m also aware of swimmer guy in the next lane, and also balancing my urge to compete with my awareness that the vast sky is above me, seemingly going on forever (12, 13, 14). And it occurs to me that competitiveness is based on scarcity – the certainty that only one of us can win, that there are only so many ways to win, that the person in second place is the first loser, and all that – while the unfolding blue sky is a sign of the abundance that exists all around me, and (16, 17) there is no reason to think that I should be denied participation in that natural abundance.

THUNK!

I hit the wall. Hard. And not for the first time in my life, I reflect on the balance that I came up against in that moment, in the deep end of the pool, as I thrash about for air. The desire to live in my head, where I feel connected and integrated, and the necessity to maintain an awareness of the world around me so I do not hit my head on the wall, or lose my license because of a forgotten ticket, or watch undocumented folks get scapegoated.

That no man’s land on the border, between the aspiration of what could be and the stark reality of what actually is, seems to be my lot in which to dwell, and so I find myself here in the Deep South, living between Humidity and Hope.

I’m rooting for you.

It’s probably the nicest pool I have ever seen in my life.

It’s the half-sized pool, 25 meters long, but so wide it’s almost square. Three walls of the room are floor to ceiling windows, and there are skylights overhead, piercing the knotty pine ceiling, flooding the room with natural light. When you speak, the sounds bounce around a bit, sounding unnatural and flat.

There is another pool in the room – a square heated pool they call the therapeutic pool, but they assure me that if no one is using it for a group, I’m welcome to use it, too. When I walked through this morning, it was in use by two women who appear to be around 80, talking in low tones while using foam dumbbells to exercise.

My focus this year, the year after my Dad’s death, has been on my health. My dad was only 21 years older than I am, and while his death from a virus says nothing about my own life expectancy, it does make one begin to count. I’ve been eating better, and logging my food. I exercise nearly every day. I prioritize getting enough sleep.

And this week, I joined a gym with a pool, because my joints are trash after years of abusing them.

This morning, I put on my trunks (which fit me perfectly 50 pounds ago, but are now relying more than they should on the drawstring to defend my modesty) and slid into a warm pool, and commenced to do laps – quiet, slow, trudging laps – the equivalent of walking as opposed to the running the speedo-clad twenty-something guy in the next lane is doing.

I can only really backstroke with any degree of proficiency, so I am watching the ceiling, following along under a wooden beam that spans the length of the room, keeping all the moving parts going the way I was taught all those years ago on Parris Island: Hands up along the sides to the armpits, then out, then down, hands cupped. My shoulder grates a bit, unused to this particular motion.

And in the aisle next to me is a Black woman somewhere in her late 70’s, with the foam dumbbells, raising them and lowering them in the water, all the while moving down the length of the shallow end of the lane sideways, back and forth. A woman I assume to be her granddaughter cheered her on, saying, “Good job, Granny!  I’m so proud of you!”

I knew I was not moving quickly, but I have to admit I did notice when Granny passed me. Several times.

And I did think, briefly, that it is a crying shame that my swimming ability is so slow that an 80-year-old woman can walk sideways faster than I can swim. But as I swam, back and forth, slowly, like an impressionistic portrait of the athlete I used to be, I couldn’t help but think how awesome it is that she is doing the work, and how great it is that her granddaughter is spending time with her, and how much I wish I could spend that sort of time with the people who loved me into being.

And then I spent some time in what my Buddhist friends call an act of Loving-kindness, where I just took Granny and her family and focused on them and wished them every good thing.

I’ve never been good at competition. I almost died as a kid, and often in the years after it was an accomplishment that I showed up. I learned long ago that whatever motivation I have to have to get through my day is going to have to come from my own motives, and not what you think of me.

And can we be honest with each other a minute and admit to ourselves and to each other just how hard the last two years have been? There has been so much put on us that we had to just survive, so any thought of winning or not seems so secondary right now. If we just show up, that feels like winning to me right now.

Wherever you are in this whole thing, I’m rooting for you. I want us all to win.

So good job, Granny. I’m proud of you, too. And while you might get there before me, I’m glad you’re ahead of me, to show me the way.