One year.
It’s hard to even comprehend that a year with Covid is upon us. A year of living through a global pandemic. So much has changed that we now have an entirely new vernacular that makes sense that didn’t a year ago. We understand a mask mandate, how to socially distance and who is safe in our pandemic pod. I might as well be speaking another language if I told you to take a rapid test and make sure to wear your PPE before we adhered to covid protocol in seeing one another. But that was a year ago. Now we know. We have experienced so much that the human spirit has not endured in over a century. We didn’t think we could,
But here we are.
My six-year-old knows how to properly wear a mask, our baby born in a pandemic has never been to the grocery store and I haven’t been in a restaurant in 365 days. At certain hours of the day there are two parents online working and three children online doing school with faithful teachers who pivoted with a moment’s notice to adapt to online teaching. They are warriors, children and teachers alike. They didn’t think they could,
But here we are.
So much of this past year includes the idea of the both/and. One of my favorite authors, Richard Rohr states that “Mature people are not either-or thinkers, but they bathe in the ocean of both-and.” The idea being that two things can be happening at once and we can have the capacity to experience both of them at the same time. This dualistic thinking is a large part of the way that I am able to comprehend the year that was Covid. Not because I am so mature but because I would come undone if I couldn’t hold space for the good and beautiful in the midst of the pain and loss. I didn’t think I could,
And yet here I am. I would venture to guess that you are here too.
We were there, in the midst of chaos and confusion and we are here in the midst of survival and surrender. In the process we learned quite a bit more beyond the new vocabulary in our quarantine, zoom school learning. We learned that we were so much more capable of what we never could have imagined. We were resilient and stunning in the midst of a global pandemic that will forever define this generation.
We learned that we can be concerned and yet courageous. Our children thought for others and recognized their own (perceived) immunity as they interacted with their elders and refrained from attending school. Eleven-year-olds had to think about death and dying far younger than they ever should have as they watched others get sick, some recovering, others not. They were courageous as they stopped everything familiar to enter the unknown of quarantine. Their concern always meeting the courage of their spirit.
We can be in solitude and yet know our safety. We hunkered down, we stayed home, and we isolated, and in the privilege of doing so we were able to maintain our safety. We recognized that not everyone was afforded those same circumstances. We wrestled with the idea of privilege and had conversations that were generations late. But in wearing masks to prevent the spread of a virus we vowed to take down the masks of racism and bigotry so that we could be different than those that came before us. In solitude we fought the demons of our bias and blind spots ensuring that our safety would never again be in vain. We admitted that as a white family we took our safety for granted and in our solitude, we would do the hard work of doing better, of being better.
We felt pain and simultaneously felt perseverance. The large-scale pain of a nation in deep unrest, of whole communities burned to the ground. But early the next morning we felt perseverance as we rallied with neighbors to pick up the pieces of destruction. We built back better together. Our children lost the joy of 5th grade graduation celebrations and birthday parties. We lost baby showers and visits from grandparents and yet we persevered. My 76-year-old Mother learned how to Facetime so she could meet her grandson, we held zoom graduations and made simple celebrations at home something special to remember. We persevered and in doing so learned that we could do more with less and it would still feel special. We honored our pain and simultaneously celebrated that we had persevered in so much.
With each new passing season there was more that we recognized we missed out on and yet in the midst of that we made more memories than we ever could have anticipated. We played games and baked bread, we went on walks and talked on the front porch. We missed out on basketball seasons and community theater, but we also made friendships with our brothers and fell in love with our nuclear family in ways that we may have taken for granted previously. We made more out of less and we were thankful.
Finally, we experienced grief and also held close our gain. The gain of perspective, simplicity, and each other. We grieved the loss of community members to an awful disease, the loss of relationships, the loss of experience and yet in the unfathomable beauty of the human spirit we recognized our gain. We gained the beautiful mystery of the both/and.
Here we are.