Where were you in March 2020? When did you realize that covid was a thing that would disrupt life the way you knew it? I hiked to Joshua Tree, I spent days in delirional in the natural beauty of the desert, insecure if I should return to New York. Every time I refreshed the coverage of the Times, it seemed increasingly obvious that going home would mean staying indoors in the foreseeable future.
I came back. I started working in the Times a few months later (from my living room) and soon started writing a newsletter called At homewhere I tried to help people lead full, cultivated lives from my living rooms. It was a project that was intended for people to find distribution, comfort, meaning, joy, meaning, trust and community in the midst of what was sometimes felt like unbearable uncertainty. Here’s what to look, read, cook, listen, think. You could attend this virtual disco or this virtual poetic reading or someone’s virtual birthday party, where you will sniff on the screen after a screen of the squares of people you know and people you don’t have, smiling and focused, so close and so far. Remember virtual happy hours? Remember Zum T -shirt? Remember when it was strange to see your colleagues’ bedroom decor on video calls? Who would think that Brian from analytics would choose they table lamps?
I spent so much time thinking about facing those days. We all succeeded. In the midst of a lot of confusion and sadness there was creativity. Pandemic pods. Mania of sour dough. Alfresco handle enabled by each imaginative shape of the external heating element. My friend started a dance troop in her city that practiced his choreography on Zoom, and then performed her dances on neighboring lawns. Another built a bed in the back of his SUVs rode all over the country, sleeping in his car. I reconnected with my colleagues I hadn’t talked to for decades; Once we realized how easy Facetime was, it seemed funny that we didn’t do it all the time.
Five years not long enough to get perspective, it’s not really. It’s a round number, so it feels meaningful: good time for retrospectives, ask what we learned, how we changed, how we didn’t. The things we swore we would do differently when “the world has opened again” – do we do them? I vowed more to socialize, more dinners, more dancing, more trips, more visiting people just because. No more personal contact with other people for granted! I would like to renew these vows, but the world has opened, and so is the possibilities. There were so many places for longing in locking, so much time to romanticize freedom of movement and fantasy about the possible lives we would lead in the future. But if you did not set some plan to perform these intentions, it was easy enough to slide back into how it used to be: other people are sometimes dear and boring are a lot of time and it takes effort to plan a party for dinner.
