What’s the point?
Today, two people said things to me that have stuck with me — and I think they will for a long time.
“I’m feeling a little overwhelmed right now, but I just keep remembering that all of this has already happened somewhere already before. We know what’s coming. We know what’s going to happen. So every headline you read, every bad piece of news, we knew it was going to come out.”
Later that day, after yet another event was closed, someone else said
“what’s the point?”
We were talking about bike races, and a women-only series taking place in a couple months that made the intelligent decision to cancel today. And I understood my friend; I felt her pain. Why get on our bikes and keep on training when we can’t go outside, can’t see people, can’t ride with our friends and teammates? Because this grief, this pain, it wasn’t about a bike race — I mean, sure, it was, we’ve been training a year for the event — but the race is the object we can latch on to, that is small enough for us to feel anger, and pain, and terror, and grief, and frustration, and outrage, and despair, and hopelessness. You can’t take the whole of your city, of your country, of the world, and keep all that in your head. And so with all of us, probably, there will be something — be it a race or a show or a wedding or vacation — that breaks us, if only briefly, because that’s what humans do when something catastrophic happens.
And that’s okay.
After all this, I got on my bike and I rode circles in Central Park under the setting sun, practicing cadence intervals my coach had assigned. And I marveled at how well I thought I was weathering this crisis, all things considered. Did I sit on my kitchen floor and cry last night as I listened to the mayor shut down New York City public schools? Yes, I did — because I’m scared for the kids who won’t be getting food, who don’t have a safe place to go now, for how bad the projections must be look trigger this move, for the people in jails and prisons who don’t have the ability to isolate, who won’t have access to ventilators, for the fact that I believe we’ve woefully too late for any of this to have a good outcome and all we’re aiming for is not the worst possible one. I did, but I then picked myself up off the ground and proceeded to make mozzarella for the first time, because that’s what you do, I guess, when you have a lot more free time on your hands and nowhere to go.
I said to my husband earlier this evening, “I think I’m doing okay because I’ve lived my life with under-medicated anxiety and depression, and there’s been a lot of times in my life where I’ve asked “what’s the point?” and never found the answer, maybe still don’t have it, so I guess I’ve found a way to keep going even when you know there’s that question there and you don’t have a response for it and probably never really will.”
And that’s bleak, yes, but I have a counter-argument for myself: there might not be a grand answer for the question “what’s the point?” but there are a hundred thousand individual responses that, like locusts swarming a field, can completely overwhelm the gaping void of the bigger question and fill the emptiness that is the lack of a large, sweeping response. Because what’s the point?
The point is that my bicycle team is spectacular, and our collective strength and support of each other as the world spirals out of control these past few weeks has been nothing short of mind-boggling to me. Because my colleagues at work are similarly stunning; we closed our office on March 4th and work, as well as our network to support each other professionally and personally, has held strong these past two and a half weeks. We held a digital happy hour on Friday that was attended by almost half the company, and it was marvelous to sit on Zoom on a Friday night and laugh with these familiar faces — all of us who are facing the same kinds of challenges and demons in our own very unique, very personal ways. We might not be allowed to see anyone but those who live in our household, but we are far from alone.
Riding my bicycle under the dim and setting sun, I felt like my city was dying around me. The playgrounds were largely empty; responsible, but also desolate to see one lone toddler on the jungle gym and, across the empty expanse of play structures, a single mother pushing a baby in a tire swing in silence. I wanted to rejoice in the rare opportunity to complete sprint intervals at 5 PM on a Monday afternoon without having to dodge a tourist or a CitiBike commuter, but the lack of them made my chest feel tight.
I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m on the leadership team at my company; I helped make the policy to close down in the beginning of March and have everyone work from home. We knew that in the best case, people would look back and say “remember that time our company made us all work from home and nothing happened?” and in the worst case, we’d be ahead of others’ similar decisions. I’m an introvert; I haven’t seen anyone but a few of my cycling teammates, my husband, and incidental contact with store owners for almost three weeks, and I’m okay with that, because I’m used to being alone and communicating with friends solely through the internet because they live far away. I’m relatively healthy; I’ve been cleared of asthma and haven’t had what used to be a yearly pneumonia since 2017.
But everyone knows someone who has a high-risk pregnancy, or is undergoing chemotherapy, or is on autoimmune drugs, or has COPD or asthma, or is elderly, or is one of another thousand things that can put us at higher risk. And we know that not everyone gets severe symptoms — that it takes a long time, sometimes, for symptoms to even show — that the younger we are, the more likely we are to carry it to the older and more vulnerable without realizing what we’re doing.
And there are companies out there that are firing people because they won’t come to work. There are people who have been suspended indefinitely because the companies are closing completely, so they can’t get unemployment, and yet they have no paycheck to help them through these times.
It’s incredibly human to be upset about a personal loss — vacation, important race, sports league you can no longer watch — and incredibly human to be selfishly fixated on these things and forget the community around us. It’s hard to hold it in our heads, how big and scary this is, and unbelievably overwhelming, so it’s okay to narrow down on what you can comprehend, and then find a reason to keep moving forward after you grieve your personal loss.
But do not forget the people we are protecting — even if you personally don’t know someone who is forbidden to work from home, even if you personally don’t know a person with an ailment listed in the high vulnerability list. Remember that in a couple months, this country could have hundreds of thousands (or millions) fewer people walking around than we do today.
Remember the point of life: to live it. And let’s give as many people that chance as we can.
