Doubt Is An Uncomfortable Condition
I can’t tell you why, but I decided to look back in my journal and see what I was thinking about one hundred and sixty two days ago.
“Just read that the NBA season has been suspended after a player tested positive for COVID-19 and Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson tested positive. We decided to postpone our Sweden trip, too, just yesterday. (We were going to visit family, including a new grandson never met). Guess I won’t spread anything with my blog post this morning. One question I saw while briefly checking news was what if the world reacted this way about climate change.
Anyway the WHO has officially labeled this a pandemic and a microscopic virus without limbs has brought the world to its knees. Whether it’s spread by aerosol or droplet or is a fomite (left on a surface) this little creature has done what all world leaders combined can’t do or couldn’t do. I can’t pretend I don’t have a kind of grudging respect for this kind of power, like a hurricane or tsunami, blizzard or earthquake. It’s humbling for homo sapiens. It might kill me or someone I love, but still. Is this a version of Tennyson’s nature red in tooth and claw? May you live in interesting times, indeed, as the proverb goes.
Several of us wore gloves at cash registers yesterday and a number of customers were wearing them too. (I work in a grocery store for my day job) The shelves were gutted. Pasta, toilet paper, soup, on and on. Anyway, it’s gripping, the news is, and cries out for eyes and ears. We all have to talk, I guess, trying to figure this out.
This is going to get a lot worse before it gets better, apparently. We ain’t seen nothing yet. So, ‘flatten the curve’ is the directive. What we’re seeing now is from two weeks ago, like a star whose light was emitted long ago and is just now reaching earth.
We have two pallets of canned beans just sitting on the sales floor near the coffee station, one of black and one of garbanzo. People are afraid of COVID-19, of being quarantined, of the unknown, and this is deeply emotional, this fear of food insecurity. It’s easy to let our imaginations run away here. There’s some room and some need for balance, balance in all things, and asking ‘What’s great about this?’ Even this, yes.
Aware of great gratitude for this habit. Good to have this place of retreat and re-energizing and solitude daily. Open book, click pen, sip coffee, put on my dad’s dog tag, be here now. ‘I have my books and my poetry to protect me. I am shielded in my armor. Hiding in my room, safe within my womb, I touch no one and no one touches me. I am a rock, I am an island.’ Also thought about Moby Dick and how apropos the narrative is. We are all on the Pequod right now.
Grateful to be a runner, too, another solitary pursuit like writing. Even with all gyms and YMCAs closed, I can work out. Peaceful to run under a Red Tail hawk and see a high contrail needling through the cerulean blue.”
That’s part of what one American was thinking about. Life has continued, the earth still spins many days later. Where are we now? What’s next? Who knows? I think Voltaire had it about right. “Doubt is an uncomfortable condition, but certainty is a ridiculous one.”
