A few years ago, I was walking in a cute suburban downtown. Dave was with me and the day was lovely in the way that only an off-season Florida day can be: the air was cool, the sun was warm, and the universe seemed to be completely chill and happy doing its quantum dance.
If you’ve ever fallen face-first onto the sidewalk, you’ll be familiar with the bizarre time-stretch that is the trip down. “Oh!” I thought. “Why is the ground at that angle?” The horizon—both far and near—were now 135 degrees ass-end up, and without warning, there was grass where the sky had been, and concrete coming up fast.
After the interminable trip down comes the stinging of first contact of hard reality with soft skin, and after that, the dull ache of bones which have been shocked into strange positions—but just enough to make them complain, not crack.
Today, I fell face-first again, into whatever the “new normal” is. I’m struggling with what to even call this mess that I fell into; it’s not post-COVID-19, because the death toll is still climbing. But whatever it is, I’m stinging and achy just one day after Florida “re-opened” and the ground slipped out from under me.
I missed a meeting—a real, in-person meeting, complete with masks and social distancing—that I didn’t know I had. Not so bad, eh? I mean, compared to cracked bones and stitches, a missed meeting is the metaphysical equivalent of a boo-boo. But like an old injury that just won’t heal right, this trip-and-fall brought up every place that still hurts, every half-healed stress fracture in my psyche.
I cried, because everybody who falls down also feels stupid.
The rest of the day, I’ve been holed up like a spiritual invalid. I’m nursing my newly aggravated old wounds and just feeling profoundly sad.
Why?
I can feel the world returning to “normal.” In the past two months, I’ve heard 4 or 5 planes fly over; I’ve heard 15 in the past two days. In place of the quiet rustling of leaves, I hear the traffic all around me on the busy suburban road that wraps around our house like the handlebars of a hipster’s mustache. I feel like I have to say goodbye to the exquisitely clear air and the quiet calm that had settled in on humanity. I feel like we got bored of something that was shockingly and surprisingly sacred.
And I feel like we’ve missed the chance to learn some profound truth, that we’ve turned away from some universal doorway that led to a better place. Everybody wants to get back to “normal,” and I can’t shake the feeling that “normal” just ain’t that great. I can’t help feeling that we are too quick to turn back to our screens, our distractions, to all the things that numb us. We can’t wait to get back to business, back to stress, back to sleep. Because let’s be honest—sliding back into something comfortable is easier than working through the great change of our times.
We got bored of something that was shockingly and surprisingly sacred.
As an empath, I pick up on other’s feelings, and I often have to go through the process of distinguishing them from my own so that I don’t carry around a bunch of stuff doesn’t belong to me. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out who this profound sadness, this philosophical mourning belongs to. I guess it must be mine.
When I fell that day in sunny Florida, a stranger came rushing over to help. I guess today I’m hoping for a kind, compassionate spirit to put a band-aid on my boo-boo.
