On Hope and Distraction

Long walk-and-talks with friends: probably my number one pandemic coping strategy.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the differences between hope and distraction. Both can help us make it through the dim and dreary times. But they aren’t the same thing. This summer has been an object lesson in that difference.

I have pretty vivid memories of learning the good news about the vaccines, back in November 2020. We were down in Philadelphia for the week. I remember taking a rainy walk through the neighborhood, puddles collecting on the slate sidewalks, foliage luminous against the gray clouds. I was listening to the latest episode of The Daily, and listening to Michael Barbaro process, along with the rest of us, the numbers on Pfizer and Moderna. These vaccines weren’t just effective. They were mindblowingly effective, and there was more than one in the pipeline.

For all the vague formlessness of the last eighteen months, there are certain stark moments that cleave time into a clear Before and After. The George Floyd protests; the declaration of Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania; the insurrection at the capitol. And the good news about the vaccines was, for me, one of those moments. Right then, right there, on that rainy walk down that quiet suburban street, was when I suddenly had permission to start thinking about the future again. I didn’t realize this within the moment itself, and I didn’t start acting on that permission right away. But I had it; and that, as a thing unto itself, was big! Life had felt muddy and uncertain for so long, but in a split second, that reality was reframed. My mind divides the pandemic into distinct phases, and when that good news about the vaccines arrived, I felt myself moving from Survival Mode into Hope Mode.

(Did I think about the future much, during Survival Mode? Surely I did. Surely, during that first stretch of Covid, I entertained the possibilities of what the coming weeks and months and years might look like, distracted myself with some form of daydreaming. But the thing is, I can’t remember any of it! Nothing stuck, because none of it was real, and as hard as I might try to convince myself otherwise, something in me knew better than that.)

By late April, I was fully vaccinated. May and June were months of exuberance. I had shifted out of Hope Mode and squarely into Living Mode. And living mode was wonderful. I didn’t require hope to get through the day. I could simply be in the moment. Dinner parties! Weekends with friends! Other unthinkable luxuries! It was so much fun. Did it feel tenuous, or fleeting? I don’t know; honestly, I don’t recall. I was too absorbed with the fullness of it.

And then, partway through July, something started to change. You probably felt it, too. (The warning signs were there much earlier, of course. I remember going to a volunteer shift in June, and someone was talking about her aunt, who was vaccinated and generally careful, but had a breakthrough case of Covid. She wasn’t hospitalized or anything, but it sure wasn’t pleasant. I remember thinking, at the time, well, yeah, but this is highly unusual thing, and I doubt I’ll hear of many more of these breakthroughs. Oh, Anna-of-June! How little you knew.) The writing was beginning to appear on the wall. But even as Delta entered the collective lexicon (joining the hallowed ranks of “fomites” and “mRNA” and “Fauci”), this weird semi-normal state still offered enough to distract me from the looming reality. In that second half of July, the calendar was filled with more dinners, more visits to see friends. I kept myself busy! I was in the final stretch of training for a half-marathon, which I ran in Central Park on August 1. Having that date on the calendar was a big, and blessed, source of distraction. I had my blinders on. It demanded my focus.

The focus was rewarded. I loved running the race; I hadn’t expected to enjoy it so much. I also hadn’t realized how much of a mental shift would occur, once it was behind me. My parents came down to the city for the half-marathon. After, Andrew and I drove with them back to Rhode Island. It was a mellow week, cooking dinner together, taking walks in the woods, swimming in the afternoon, watching the Olympics. It took me a minute to unwind from the intensity, as it always does. (Isn’t that the worst part of a week-long vacation? It’s only at the end of the week that you actually start to unwind.) But by the end of the week, along with the relaxation, I felt a certain … blue-ness. That’s the only way to describe it. I felt a little blue.

My first instinct is often to try and deduce an explanation (was it a post-race come-down? work-related stress?). But I have been learning, gradually, and with the help of some very wise guidance, that it’s better to just let the feeling be. You don’t have to understand it, or try to fix it right away. It can just exist. I suspect that the blue-ness had been lurking for a little while, ever since the tide on Delta began to turn. There were enough distractions to keep it bay. But then, as they always do, the distractions eventually ran out.

Everything runs out eventually. That’s the thing about life, the bad of it, but also the good of it. I felt blue for a little while (mourning the plans that had to be shelved; mourning that feeling of unbridled optimism; little things in the grand scheme, but they have a way of adding up), but then the blue-ness passed, and I felt so much better. I felt better than I had felt, even, before the blue-ness. The end of distraction meant a kind of reconciliation with reality, and that reconciliation was, on some level, an enormous relief.

This past month of August felt different from June and July. The horizon grew close again, the way it had during so much of the pandemic. Here is my world. For the time being, it’s not the biggest world. There remain some restrictions. I think we’re probably entering yet another phase of the pandemic, where the vaccines have helped us achieve a certain baseline of safety, but it will never be perfectly safe, and this is okay—the fact of being alive means nothing is perfectly safe—but now we are navigating a gray space, and it’s important, in doing so, to listen very carefully to that inner voice. This requires a certain measure of quiet and stillness to come through. There can be a time and place for distraction, but not always, not everywhere.

I’m an optimist by nature. I’m always going to find things that give me hope. One source of hope, lately, has been stepping back and observing how friends and loved ones have weathered the last eighteen months. These people have been through some very hard times, many of them are still in the midst of those hard times, but they are learning from them. Even in this weird world, they are taking the reins of their own lives. They are figuring out what they need, and reconciling themselves to reality, with their eyes wide open. It’s an infinitely renewable resource, this human capacity for change. It is also, inherently, the ability to just keep going. To just. keep. fucking. going. I watch the people around me doing this, and it’s an infinite wellspring of hope, and it feels nothing like distraction, because this hope, actually, brings me right back to the awareness of where we are: back to the pandemic. The pandemic! Year two, or year two million, who can say.

Summer went fast, like it always does. I’m sad to say goodbye to August, my favorite month, the month of slow evenings and ripe tomatoes and empty streets. This last-week-before-Labor-Day is always a time of heightened, extra-palpable transition. In the park this morning I saw a high school track team out for a run, which I haven’t seen in months. Change is in the air; our second Covid fall is about to begin. I don’t pretend to have the slightest clue of what it might bring, or how it might feel, but I’ve got my pencils sharpened. I’ve got the itch to turn on the oven again. I’ve got the people around me. And that, for now, is pretty wonderful.