FAILURE TO LAND

“The world is too much with us, late and soon…” William Wordsworth

Getting around the city of Vancouver now freaks me out. It didn’t use to. Of course, it doesn’t help that my eyesight has declined dramatically since last I drove anything but a golf cart. (And no, I don’t actually golf). Thankfully, I do have glasses, so they’ll have to do until cataract surgery comes to the rescue. But really, cataract surgery? What is my world coming to?

The fact remains that, after so many months huddled away in safe, (aka small, out-of-the-way) places, the task of navigating the “new normal” in the city where I’ve lived for thirty plus years is daunting. Nightmarishly so. The unfamiliarity of even regular haunts has shaken my confidence greatly. A simple visit to a go-to restaurant requires us to mask up, provide proof of vaccines, a picture ID, and then dine in a plexiglass cubby that reminds me of the carrels at Cameron Library back at university. Of course it becomes routine after the first couple of days (or weeks, in my case), but a part of me rebels at the idea that this is now what passes for routine. Where’s the fun in it?

Places that already intimidate me — medical and dental clinics, hospitals, labyrinthine parking lots, are made more so by the new protocols. One has to wind one’s way around stanchions (a word I’ve just learned) like those at an airport; follow the yellow arrows marked “in” for one door and “out” for another; sit or stand on this spot and not on that; sanitize hands; get temperature checked; don designated masks. Yesterday at the doctors’ office the greeter? gate-keeper? instructed me to throw out my mask and replace it with a strikingly similar one of hers. Seriously?

After my appointment, in a streak of rebellion, I ’followed’ the arrows backwards and triumphantly walked out the “in” doors to where my hubby was waiting in the car. Nobody came after me. There was nobody within fifty feet. It felt like I’d successfully robbed a bank. Simple pleasures. Aside from this small victory though, I find it hard to see any humour in what passes for daily interactions. But life is rife with absurdity.

After meticulously following the numerous instructions necessary to get a coffee at the corner café, we wandered outside to sit at a table that hadn’t been wiped since Joe Who was prime minister. There was, however, a charming centerpiece — a bottle of hand sanitizer. Guess it’s a “clean-your-own-table” kinda place. And then, after running the gauntlet to visit the doctor’s office I head out into a street blocked by a mob of shouting, sign-toting anti-vaxx-anti-masking-ex-essential-health-care workers defending their right to spread — if not COVID variants C,D and E, then a vitriolic chorus of “THIS IS NOT THE LAND OF THE FREE!” or some such rhetoric. Join the club.

But that’s not the topic of this blog. I just got sidetracked – as the ancient Greeks would say – on my way to the Agora. Actually the expression goes “a funny thing happened on my way to the Agora”, but, as I said earlier, I fail to see the humour in the forty-eight hours I spent in the city. So instead, what struck me as an important theme is a strategy for putting the “hum” back in the “drum” of redundant daily activities. If Martha Stewart can establish an empire out of domestic drudgery, I think I should be able to leaven the heck out of vaccination passports that somehow can’t be had, despite dutifully having gotten vaxxed. And when was “vaxxed” even a word? My nemesis, aka spellcheck, didn’t bat a digital eye at it.

In sum, I think I’m having an existential crisis. As with all of COVID-19, I have to admit that I also didn’t see this coming. I cooked and baked my way to fifteen extra pounds while sheltering-at-home for the first blurry months of the pandemic. I hobby-gardened, played ukelele (badly), took virtual classes, zoom-talked, taught yoga and blogged (but drew the line at getting a dog). And as I said, I got vaxxed. And I thought that would be that. We’d all learn something positive to take away from this weird blip in human history and then we’d GET ON WITH IT, ALREADY.

So I started reading about existential crises and came up with a quote from philosopher Blaise Pascal:

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

I don’t know where to go with that. I don’t know anyone who has spent more time in a room alone than everyone-I-know has this past year and a half. However, I found a faint beam of light in the following comment by Thomas Ligotti: “Without meaning-charged emotions keeping your brain on the straight and narrow, you would lose your balance and fall into an abyss of lucidity.”

I’m not entirely sure what he means by this, but it points to a significant component of the human experience: meaning-making. Every thinking human being has got to find reasons to get up in the morning. Reasons, or meaning, for why we do what we do. And these reasons need enough emotional investment to power us through the actual doing. I went swimming this morning because I know the exercise calms and clears my mind. I took a chai tea and housewarming gift to an ailing friend because it made us both feel better; I cooked a healthy dinner, and shared half of it with my neighbor because I could relate to her uber-busy day. I posted a photo on WhatsApp and enjoyed a lively chat about recipes, as much for the connectivity as for ideas of what to eat. And now I’m blogging a kind of message-in-a-bottle to anyone who, like me, needs people. Needs relationships that give life heart and meaning. And to whom one can reach out after a couple of hairy, new-normal days in the big city. Sorry Mr. Pascal; I disagree. Sitting quietly alone in a room ain’t for me.

Which leads me to conclude this blog with the epigram of E.M. Forster’s Howard’s End:

                 “Only Connect”. 

Please do. Me to me. You to you. You to me and me to you. And lots of other people, too. We’re counting on you.