Going Back: Bringing Lessons from COVID Into Our In-Person Lives

Choosing what to take and what to leave behind

Over Memorial Day, I had the chance to go away for the weekend with my friend Maddie. We went to a tiny inn in Westport, Maine. I brought my pup, Liberty, and we journeyed out between rain showers to hike in the wetland preserves, explore Boothbay Harbor, and smell the lilacs and honeysuckle in full bloom. On one of the long New England evenings, we curled up by the big iron stove in the inn’s common spaces, enjoying a glass of wine and talking while the temperature fell down to 48 degrees. As people trickled in from their dinners, we kept reflexively picking up our masks, then lowering them after assuring the comfort of others, and we soon found ourselves at the center of a small group, exchanging recommendations for what to do the next day. At 10 pm our growing delight at life without masks was punctuated by the entrance of a couple returning from a fancy dinner in Rockland. It turns out that they were celebrating his 70th birthday and the soon-to-be arrival of two great-granddaughters. Would we join them in the barn for some champagne? Yes, we would.

As I drove home, I thought to myself how lovely it was to be vaccinated, not to have to ask Maddie who she’d seen or where she’d been before we shared a room. And beyond that, how lovely it is that many of those who want vaccines have had access to them, too. It means we can go out to eat and not feel guilty about it. It means we feel safe chatting over drinks with strangers. I broke no out-of-state quarantine restrictions with my travels. After the year we’ve all had, this feeling is a certain, important type of freedom. 

But as exciting as it was to realize this, it was quickly followed by a sense of fear. While there are some parts of my prior life that I want to reclaim, there are some parts that I want to leave behind forever. The long commutes. The lack of professional boundaries. The pressure to always be doing something fun and cool. The social events that are about quantity vs. quality. The carbon footprint I left with all my travels. Cancellation fees. 

It’s thrilling to realize that we may soon be able to hug the people we love, travel to beautiful places, hear live performances, collaborate in person with our teams. It’s a relief to know that the numbers of people dying every day from this disease are shrinking. But for me, the question on my mind as I traveled home was, “Did this pandemic last long enough for us to have the reckoning we need as a society? As a planet?” 

In one of my previous journals I spoke about my friend Amy, who called this pandemic The Great Reckoning. What she meant was that as a nation we have deep and troubling racial inequity. We have extreme and increasing income inequality. We are using our natural resources at a pace that will make us extinct, and our political willpower to take action is inconsistent over the time horizon that commitment is needed. It’s like the pandemic was a massive, global “time out” for us to think about the impact of our actions. It hurt. We suffered. But we had the time to think about what really mattered. To realize that we COULD adapt to a world none of us had imagined. To realize that in fact, that world might not be all bad. 

I know that for many people, it’s exciting to go back to the office and see colleagues again, to get out of a home where there may be a lot going on. But for me personally, COVID was a cover under which I could implement a new relationship with work and with my expectations for myself. Instead of feeling that there was always more I could be doing, I realized that at a certain point I had done enough. I no longer spent hours in traffic, worrying about whether I would be late for reasons out of my control. I got to explore places outside of the cities I’d occupied for the past 10 years, and realize how important my family is to me and what a good and beautiful life can be lived in a small town, even though we don’t have the glitz and glam of the city. And I had to decide which of my people I needed to see in person badly enough that I would spend 14 days in isolation beforehand. 

My fear stems from the idea that these changes won’t last without COVID. Will companies navigate the challenges of becoming remote optional without the impetus of contagious disease? Will our lawmakers agree on economic policy that works for ALL, not the most wealthy, once the last stimulus checks are paid? Will we take steps to abate pollution, rather than mitigate wildfires, now that the ashes have cooled across the Western United States? (Side note, I highly recommend A Life on Our Planet. It has stayed with me since I watched it in December.)

I do not think this will be the easy path. In fact, I think it will feel more destabilizing at first. But I think the window is open, as my policy school professors used to say, in a way that it has never been before. And, to pull wisdom from another source, namely a fellow teacher of mine who said to an angry parent when we were publishing midterm grades, “You can cry now, or you can cry later.” Don’t we want to face this challenge while there is still time to do something about it? 

What is empowering to me about this realization is that many of these decisions give us the opportunity to say how we will reenter normal life. For myself, that means I will keep living a life that gives me the freedom of time that makes me feel rich. I am not going to let the conventional ideas of success tell me that my old farmhouse isn’t fancy enough or that my Subaru has too much dog hair or that it’s weird that I keep goats. I am going to keep investing in relationships where we go deep, and if I don’t feel like going to a big event, I’m going to stay home, with my Old Fashioned and a nice book. 

This doesn’t answer the national and global challenges, though. What can I as one person do about emissions abatement? Wealth inequality? Unequal economic opportunity? It’s a hard question to answer, one whose complexity I have too often allowed to let me off the hook. But the best answer I can come up with is to deeply care, to care so much that everyone who knows me knows that I am not okay with our status quo. To read and write about these subjects, to bring them as a lens to every decision I make.

Whether for personal reasons or global ones, I think I am not alone in feeling that we need to recognize and define the changes we want to be permanent in our lives. Whether it is something as concrete as the choice of where you work, or something as intangible as a rediscovery of nature, it is okay and even wise to refuse to go back. But it’s important to note that that is not the safer option. We have to CHOOSE this path. 

I am reminded of something published by Arundhati Roy, the stunning Indian author, on April 3, 2020. She writes, “Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. 

“We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.”

What is my fight? I ask myself. And I wonder if it is this: The willingness to say the thing that others think but do not voice. To recognize the moments when our national thirst for efficiency erodes our global mandate for humanity. To be the ally who stands beside you when you say, “I will not go back.”

I am curious: what are you leaving behind?