coming of age in the age of pandemic: keeping moral stamina alive
There’s a word used to describe youth in Japanese that I’ve always found vividly poetic: 青春 (sei-shun). Spelled with the characters “blue” “spring”, it expresses more than an age or number: it represents the springtime of one’s life. It describes the vibrance, the abiding anticipation of being young and having an (at least subconscious) awareness of coming times. A field of cyan, unmellowed flower buds just barely on the cusp of blooming, tinged by the exhilarating suspense of what kind of scenic garden time will tend it into. A blue, burgeoning beginning to a soon-vibrant spring.
Over the past few months, the “springtime” of my life has been washed blue in a way that’s far less thrilling. Blue, not like the unripe buds of a garden of flowers in the fugitive moments before they bloom, but blue, like the indigo depths of tsunami tides that flood a young garden and drain its potential to grow. My days of youth have felt blue, not swelling with anticipation, but bruised by loss.
I think this feeling has become somewhat universal. The experience of a global pandemic has struck the entire world with grief and left many young people feeling deprived of their experience of youth, a time in our lives often associated with throbs of excitement and the freedom to explore the highest and lowest intensities of life. Indeed, the need to distance ourselves from one another has put much of society on hold, taking as collateral the intimacy we had taken for granted. For us, as social creatures, this has proven to be a difficult (though direly necessary ) adjustment. I can’t help but wonder what kind of generational scar this shared experience of loss — and the subsequent indentation in our experience of coexistence — is leaving as it continues to linger.
“By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.” — Ernest Hemingway
Call it escapism, call it desperate craving for some ounce of insight, but when I find myself mired in dire straits, I turn to art almost out of habit. Lately I’ve found the writing that emerged from the Lost Generation to resonate with me most profoundly. The same looming scent of disillusionment seems to permeate life for characters in Lost Generation stories as it does the stories of my generation. I think there’s a reason for this: whether it be the result of living through the horrors of the first global, mechanized war or experiencing a mass global pandemic, both generations grapple(d) with the extremities of loss during their coming-of-age. This is the life we know — one of attrition. One of unprovoked loss that drags on between blurred lines, overseen by safeguarded commanders who only pull strings to fortify the walls that harbor them while continuing to allow millions to wither in trenches. Surely, this kind of experience, compounded by pre-COVID conditions such as devastating climate change and the moldering of structures and certitudes which had seemed to prevail in earlier times, is bound to have reverberating effects on what comprises the foundational verities of a generation.
Now, by no means do I intend to eulogize our generation before we even get the chance to make something of and for ourselves. I think we have a tendency to obsess over our personal legacies and fixate on how we are perceived because we covet something to hold onto that underlies our meaning for existence. The pulsating question of What will I be remembered for? has haunted people throughout human history as we attempt to navigate this life and make ‘meaning’ out of our own. I think of cave paintings and see relics of people who painted the world they saw and opted to inject themselves into that scenery. After all, there’s nothing more human than the prints of hands stretched out in greeting and etched onto cave walls, reaching thousands of years into the future as if uttering out: “I am here.” But what if we were to let that go?
If there is anything I have gotten to know really well in the past year, it’s the ephemerality of things. Endings, more often than not, fall upon us with little to no warning. I remember reading a headline last year claiming that our generation (Generation Z) is a lot less hedonistic than past ones — but far more lonely. Because the future we’ve been left to look forward to has always been an uncertain one, while we are dedicated to directing our attention toward social and policy issues, it is difficult to do so with optimism. I believe an awareness of the inevitability of some kind of an end to all things nudges us, not towards decadence, but towards action and unity. We can better acknowledge the value of what we do in a passing moment when we consider the interconnectivity of each of our energies. Even our subtlest actions emit rippling waves of influence: our butterfly effect inescapably reaches others in the shared vast vacuum of coexistence. Doesn’t that alone give our existence intrinsic value? Doesn’t that make us intrinsically connected?
While I am curious to see how we will collectively respond to this extraordinary experience, rather than worry about how we will be remembered, I think it’s important to focus on what we can do, now, for the sake of life that is, as well as life that is to be. And what we can do right now is show up for each other. What we can do is responsibly social-distance, vote, put in the work to confront social and policy issues within our communities and other prevailing structures, live conscientiously to take better care of our environment, check in on friends and be aware of ourselves, continue to try to view the world around us from myriad perspectives and break out of the comfort of our own familiarized — yet extremely narrow — subjective worldviews, and so on and so forth. There are always ways in which we can look out for each other. In order to sustainably reimagine and build a better future, we have to know that we’re not alone.
Hope is an indelible force. Despite all that we’ve experienced, I’d like to believe that we will continue to come together and to show up for each other, and that we will only get better at doing so. It’s this pulsing, relentless moral stamina with regards to a dedication to change which underpins our spirit of youth. Robert Reich recently wrote that the single most important thing that keeps him optimistic about the future is his students. He wrote that seeing young people’s commitment to remedying the huge structural issues we will be inheriting makes it impossible for him to be downbeat. Especially after having experienced “loss” on such a substantial scale, we need to hold onto this. If there’s a way out of our bluest spring, it’s together.
