new normal, who dis?
On many nights during the last winter, I often woke up with a start. I had had a recurring nightmare. One in which I could not remember the names of my friends. I found myself slowly turning invisible. Slowly being drained of all my inherited melanin, smoothed out like translucent baking paper. And while a slowing down, recalibration, and a general repose is recommended during the harshest season of the year, I found that the pandemic had compounded all of my problems leaving me occasionally with little to no interest in life itself. This lethargic isolation was further catalyzed by the silent madness of shuttling between lockdowns, lurching into social gatherings, and overextending my conversational muscles because I was craving companionship. Unmet by the warmth of the sun, I found that I was slowly losing the petals of a flower garden I had planted years ago — all my wonderful friendships.
If I enumerate all the friends lost and all the friends gained, I am definitely far poorer than when this whole ordeal began. Thankfully, I’ve lost none to death, but many to fickleness, distance, and irrevocable cracks caused by this neverending despair. I try not to fret but it is hard not to see the pandemic as a character reckoning for all of us. Whether we like it or not, we are going to come out changed people on the other side.
In the meantime, what did we do with all these claustrophobic emotions? We stole the chance to travel, to broaden our horizons whenever the limits of what we could do were expanded but in the process, I forgot to greet my neighbor, my classmates, and my friends who live a few kilometers away. But there was an insistent anxiety of time passing, of things evolving, and of all relationships being compressed in time and in space. In the three years, how many pandemic babies have been born? And how many couples have been elevated into parenthood and incomparable states of preoccupation? How many weddings have I missed? For many, this standstill nature of the COVID-19 years is only an illusion. Promotions have been handed out, raises bargained for, houses moved, and many a celebration still carried out. Virus or not, like how any personal tragedy tends to illuminate, we found that the world runs onward ignoring what we feel and however deeply we feel it.
The pandemic also showed me who the real skeptics are and turned almost everybody political. A vaccination is political, life is political, and so is death. If the modern world enabled the reasonably rich or the middle class to skirt around those conversations, it is now the debate of the hour stamped under every newspaper headline, the elephant that occupies water cooler conversations, and the unavoidable guest at every social gathering. Everyone is talking about it. Everyone should be talking about it.
And among these many events and outcomes, there was one that starkly stood out — which is the expected behavior of the ones we care for and respect. Do you mask? Do you self-test? On the spectrum of cautious to careless, where do you live? Literally? Some folks may find themselves cut out of friendships, social gatherings, misunderstood, abandoned, or even ostracized for these opinions they hold. And while the fear of sickness and death looms like a large cloud on the horizon, there is no time for bargaining or understanding. Even the slightest possible question of compromised integrity, you’re out the window.
And why not? After all, in this post-pandemic dawn, you can always respond with new normal, who dis?
And what will this mean for the new order? Will we learn to forgive or will we carry the scars of trust mislaid? Knowing that when things came to a head, they chose themselves over others? That they were truly selfish and objectively so? Will we own up to our own follies and take stock of what we could have done better? Will we ever ask if our own nonchalance wrecked someone’s paradise?
I don’t know the answers to any of these questions. I don’t even know when we can ask them — time seems to be the singular thing that everyone runs out of yet I feel as old as I was in 2020 and no more. Often, especially at dinner table talk, the question of restarting the clock arises. “Let us declare the past three years moot!” someone announces and there is, round the table, joyful agreement but beneath this veneer of levity, there is a deeper and more sincere request. For all of us, barring suffering or success, the time has intangibly been spent with no account or record of it. It is as jarring as to emerge at the tail end of this unprecedented tunnel and find yourself sitting on a different train. There are some photographs, some dinners hosted during variant troughs, and an occasional holiday partook when there is a respite in the regulations but apart from your skill in sourdough bread, wordle streaks, and an increasingly absurd list of online purchases, what do we really have to show for it? Survival is commendable but surely one’s life goal is to not just subsist?
There is yet another way to look at it though. Not everything needs to descend into dramatic desperation as my father always points out. One can argue that what would have been an otherwise (hopefully) unremarkable passage of time (2020 — now) has now been under incredible focus. We’ve intensely gazed at life through the veil of curfews, restricted movements, and spaces turned inaccessible. We’ve borne witness to how deliberate and devastating it can be to bide time. We have had the scrutiny of the whole world on the movements of a microorganism at the edge of life — its own and all of ours. In this chronoscope, we’ve learned to adapt. As a species, we’ve earned the qualifier “resilient”. We’ve pushed the boundaries of technology, education, art, and governance. We’ve loosened the formalities of board meetings and upped the value of hugs. We’ve learned to treat our immunity with awe and pay attention to the magical unfolding of knowledge happening in genetic laboratories. This casual dalliance called life that we have on earth has occupied afresh the front row seat of our minds. If existential dismay is not your style, have you considered existential wonder?
I am trying. And I am sure so are you. There are many things this pandemic has made us and will make of us from the looks of it. I do not think there will be a clear “Before” and “After”. On an individual level perhaps but not at a global scale. An army invasion, a school shooting, communal discontent, and general demented human behavior are already claiming newspaper real estate. The case numbers rise and dwindle with as much variance as an air quality metric, will it perhaps recede onto a weather dashboard on your phone that you never again look at? The question then is:
what do we do with the new normal now that it has arrived?
