By Catherine DiMercurio
In this state of suspension, we are given conflicting orders. We are told don’t move and keep moving as much as possible. We are playing freeze tag. We are it for a moment, running frantically with purpose, then frozen and waiting once again.
We are told many things, about how we should feel about all this, what we should and should not be doing, how we should and should not react. How can our responses to this “information” overload be anything but mercurial?
We fall back into what is familiar to us as a way of coping. We want to reach out to those who give us comfort, though our access to them may be limited, and they are going through the same thing, so it almost doesn’t seem fair anyway.
Sometimes I am fighting the feeling of shutting down, of retreating inwardly until it’s over. Except that I know that returning to self, from self, is a scary climb out of darkness sometimes and I don’t want to do that anymore or again or ever so I’m really trying, as we all are, each in our own way, to stay present, hopeful, aware and connected.
Sometimes I am feeling immersed in a task or a conversation or a thought and for a moment, or a handful of them, the world is relatively normal, and I breathe deeply and hold it, trying to keep it.
Sometimes I am talking on the phone feeling at once that all is well, and that hovering at the edges of the bubble is the dark strangeness, waiting to seep back in.
The most important relationships in our lives are all being pushed and pulled into new directions, new shapes, and each one of them is being explored and navigated differently, carefully, and we are uncertain about what we are getting right and what we are getting wrong.
Sometimes I am very much aware that a specific conservation of energy is happening within me.
When my children were in elementary school, we participated in a fundraiser in which we bought caterpillars that we housed in homemade shelters outfitted with the necessities. A small branch upon which to build a chrysalis. Some sort of food, I don’t remember what. One year we released two butterflies. Another year, one butterfly emerged from its chrysalis with a malformed wing. Sometimes it feels like we are all busy mis-shaping part of ourselves as we try to adapt to what our world has become, all the while, hoping we’ll emerge properly.
If we emerge newly malformed, it will be into a world that’s similarly altered, and we will fit one another, us and the world.
What I am discovering, perhaps just in this moment, that it is maybe best to not call it anything. Maybe it is best to not define it, to just have it be whatever it is on any given day, and to continue. To do the work of the day, whatever it may be, and be done with it.
I have found that I function better when counting on some version of the plans I’d been making. Timelines shift, the contours morph, but still, there is forward, next, soon. Though it all might be tenderly misshapen. Though we were all frozen too long, or it too long, the game of tag prolonged indefinitely. We are not being called in to dinner, or waiting for the streetlights to come on, our cue to go home.
Now there is only home. And it doesn’t mean quite what it used to. It’s not its fault.
We want so badly to not be balancing quite so precariously, on the edge of how things were, and the unknown of how they will be, how we will be. How will we be? But maybe we were always precariously balanced and we just didn’t know it.
There are no fresh insights here, just me poking around at perspectives, trying to find the best one to fit my current state of mind. I think, what is the point of writing this anyway. I think of the little butterfly, awkwardly flying as if she had the hiccups, and the great tenderness I felt toward this not-okay little creature, and I think that maybe that is the perspective that fits me today.
It helps me to think of the constants. Spring was on its way when this all started and is decidedly here now. The forsythia is an effulgent yellow, tight lilac buds are preparing to bloom once the forsythia tires from showing off. The grass is greening with each rainfall. The chubby robins chipped me awake earlier and I’m here, taking it all in. The fresh lush truth of spring. This is hard. We are lonely. We are missing each other. We are counting down the days. I am.
I cannot craft this into something cohesive. It is, if nothing else, an exercise in normalcy. It is the way I interact with ambiguity. I’m exploring the odd new way of things and trying to land on a way of being for right now, and I have great tenderness for our new shapes.
Love, Cath
Chronicles of the Open Hearted 