Written Along the Way

We are over one year into Coronamageddon. This hasn’t been an easy time for any of us. People have lost jobs or been sick or have had loved ones die. But for some it has been less obviously difficult. I didn’t lose my job or have to worry how I’d pay our bills. None of us have gotten sick. We were able to keep our kids home from school and we chose to do that. Our kids are still doing well in school despite being at home. So, what have I got to complain about? But Coronamageddon still takes a toll and it’s a cumulative toll. Everything is a little more stressful than it used to be. Our free time has fewer options and is more complicated than it used to be. Information and “facts” about the virus continue to change regularly. There’s a constant underlying worry about what will happen and what this all means and where we’re all headed from here.

It’s been over a year now that we’ve had our kids out of school. We did this to ourselves but there are consequences. Kids need to be around other kids to vent their kidness or else they’re going to vent it on us. And being stuck around us and each other without too many breaks means we’re now consistently seeing behavior that we don’t want to see. Because of Covid, work has been more stressful too. And because of what I just described with the kids, the stress doesn’t always end when I get home. This had reached the tipping point a few weeks ago.

During that time, we went away for a couple of nights. We stayed at a “camping” place. One of those places with the nice trailers that they call camping. A trailer is small so we were all stuck together in an even smaller space than usual. On one of the days on the drive back to the trailer there was some major kid drama. We were all stuck in our vehicle, a space even smaller than the trailer. When we got back to the trailer, I escaped. 

I took a walk on a bike path that went through some wetlands. I hadn’t intended to try walking meditation initially. I just needed to be alone and to have some quiet. But once I got to the bike path it occurred to me to try meditating while I was walking. I was just walking. I wasn’t trying to exercise. I didn’t care how far I walked or how long I was gone. I was going to walk and observe what I saw and smelled and felt and thought. I was going to allow the stream of thoughts in my head to do its thing without grabbing onto any of those thoughts. I would just come back to what was happening around me and let the thoughts go. Sometimes I walked fast, sometimes I slowed down. Sometimes I stopped to look or listen. 

I ended up being gone for almost an hour. I saw a bunch of birds. I heard even more. I saw all kinds of plants and flowers. I didn’t see any reptiles or mammals but at one point, when I had been walking for a while, it occurred to me that if I met a coyote I wouldn’t have an escape route and all I had with me was a tiny knife on my key chain. 

I saw more than I normally would walking along a bike path. I saw the fresh cuts on bushes and bramble that had recently been trimmed back to keep the trail clear. I saw the older cuts on bigger branches that had been cut longer ago. I saw the broken dangling branches that would eventually break off and fall to the ground and I saw some broken branches that found a landing place on a lower branch or bush on their way to the ground. I saw different fungi growing on trees. I saw dozens of red-winged blackbirds. They would tease me by being close to me and singing to me while staying far enough away so that I couldn’t get a good picture of their little red stripe.  

And I still had thoughts flowing through my head. Seeing the huge houses near the water, it was hard not to think about those people with so much money and how so many of the people living near the water anymore are the super rich. That thought spun into thoughts of politics and how there was a span of a few decades after WWII when government policies favored more wealth equality in this country but how my entire lifetime has seen these policies dismantled. Now the brainwashing has worked so well that even people who are struggling to get by believe all the hype about how government regulation is bad and how unregulated Capitalism can still save them too. 

I got annoyed with people too. We were outside and I’ve been vaccinated so I wasn’t really worried about getting someone else’s Coronas on me but in the context of this pandemic, pulling your mask up when you approach someone seems like a sign of respect. It’s a sign that you’re thinking about the other person’s well-being too. Also, walking on a bike path is like walking on the road. You walk against the oncoming traffic. You ride your bike on the right and walk on the left. But all the people I encountered on my walk were walking on the right side of the road so they were coming right at me and none of them had masks on and even though I was trying to be all quiet-minded and meditate, I still found myself being annoyed by them and judging them and thinking that they were doofuses. But I also found the humor in that because my son is really precise and gets annoyed when people don’t do things the right way and there I was getting annoyed at people for not doing things in the way that I perceived was the right way. That kid’s a chip off the old block. 

But despite the political thoughts about inequality and greed and my annoyance and judgement of my fellow walkers, I still continued to practice walking meditation. I did not hold onto those thoughts or emotions. I didn’t get all fired up or grumpy about it. Once I realized what was happening, I just let those thoughts and feelings go and went back to focusing on the moment that was happening all around me. 

I even had an enjoyable exchange with a couple that I passed. Typically, I’m happy not talking to people that I encounter. I’m usually firmly entrenched in my stream of thoughts and don’t bother to turn my energy outward. But on this walk, since I wasn’t focusing on that stream of thoughts, I was open to what was in front of me and this couple happened to be in front of me. They were on bikes but had stopped. The man had a backpack on and a dog was in the backpack. We got a Corgi during Coronamageddon and I’ve been thinking about getting one of those backpacks so I could take him with me on bike rides. And here was this couple with their dog in a backpack stopped on the path where I could talk to them. It turned out that this was actually the first time they’d had the dog in the pack and it seemed to be going well. They were happy to talk about it and the woman even said that a lot of the pictures they’d seen online were pictures of Corgis in the backpacks. I ended up seeing that couple and their dog again the next morning. They were staying at the same place that we were!

My walking meditation experiment was about being an active observer and participant in the moment that was unfolding in front of me. It was about turning my attention away from the constantly streaming live broadcast in my head to be more aware of the moment I was living in. I didn’t turn the live broadcast off, but I didn’t get sucked into it. It was about mindfulness and being open to what was actually happening without judging it or worrying about liking or not liking it. Even though the stream of thoughts in my head got a little judgey about those other people, I didn’t hold onto that. And I didn’t judge myself about what thoughts I was having. Those thoughts were just another thing to observe. At the end of that walk I felt great. I felt refreshed. I hadn’t been on autopilot. I felt like I had really experienced life over the course of that walk.

Many months ago I was thinking about how time felt different since Coronamageddon started. It seemed like a good thing to write about and explore. But I was swept up in the Corona tide and pushed along and haven’t been doing much writing at all. Getting swept up in daily activities isn’t so different than what happened in pre-Coronamageddon times, but the scope of it, when looking back, has a Corona tint to it. 

I’m calling this feeling of time strangeness “The Coronamageddon Time Tunnel”. Shit’s wacky. It’s been wacky, and even though we’re past the one year mark and people are being vaccinated and the weather is getting warm again, it’s still wacky.

It’s common, over the past few years, for me to think of a specific event and feel like it’s hard to believe that it’s already been so many years since that event happened. But then when I think about all the things that have taken place in that time interval, it feels like it could have been so much longer. This same feeling has been happening to me over the past year, but the feeling is about events that have happened during the same year. 

Remember when they closed the schools? Yeah, that was just about a year ago but think about all the stuff that’s happened since then. 

Or remember when you first started hearing about this virus? At first I was super skeptical and figured this was just another thing that the media was overblowing to get more views and clicks. It took less than a week for me to change my mind and start wondering why they hadn’t already closed the schools. But that feels like three years ago. 

Remember the election? That was only a few months ago.

Remember that public shooting? Which one?!

Then if we look at how time is moving day to day it gets weird on that level too. There continues to be so much uncertainty and so much changing information. There continues to be so much stress added on top of the normal day to day stress that we already had. And during this past year, when our options of where to go and what to do were so limited, the days started to run together even more than they used to. It’s easy to get to the end of a week, look back and just see a blur. There were not five days in that work week. There was one long blur.

A couple of months ago, I started to feel like this time distortion was ending. With the vaccines, there was some hope and we seemed to be getting used to “the new normal” (Do you hate that term as much as I do?) But that feeling quickly faded. Time is still all twisted up. When everything is blurry and there’s less unique events to look forward to and less unique events to give a marker to the time passed and everyday is go to work, come home, don’t really do any other stuff, the time tunnel continues to eat up 2021. When everyday is the same, there are no separate days to remember. What makes today different than yesterday if you’re doing the same things, going to the same places and don’t have anything else to look forward to? 

There was someone that I used to see about once per month pre-Coronamageddon. I cancelled my March 2020 appointment and didn’t see this person again until February 2021 after I’d received two doses of magical Corona vaccine. I saw this person again today for the fourth time in a row now. It felt pretty normal, like a little routine again. But then it occurred to me that an entire year went by when I didn’t have this monthly meeting and it felt so unbelievable and didn’t seem to fit into reality. When I tried to think about that gap of a year, it was almost like that year didn’t happen. I knew it did happen but since so much of the year just blurred together, it’s like it’s not marked off in my brain as a unique year. It’s like I lost an entire year. It’s just not there. 

There’s probably other symptoms of the Coronamageddon Time Tunnel too. These are just the symptoms that I’ve been experiencing. When I first thought of the idea of this time tunnel that we are living in, it just seemed like a funny idea to explain how I was feeling, but now I wonder how it’s going to end. When will it end? What will it feel like when it ends? Will I continue to feel like the time spent in the tunnel didn’t really happen at all? Someday will I look back and just feel like there’s a blurry gap in my life? Will there be pre and post-Coronamageddon memories and just a gap in my memory in between? When will the days stop feeling all the same?

Back in 1999, I was at work when the Columbine shooting happened. I’m not from Colorado so I didn’t know exactly where that high school was but I knew that I was only a few miles away. That’s the first time that I can remember hearing about something like that. It seemed so surprising and almost unbelievable. When people at work started mentioning that it was happening, in that moment, it was hard to wrap my mind around it. We didn’t have internet on our cell phones. I didn’t even have a cell phone then. The internet wasn’t how it is now either. The whole thing was just so strange.

Decades later, the surprise and shock is different now when we hear about the latest shooting. It’s still surprising and shocking in a way, because it makes no sense why someone would do it. What would motivate someone to do it? What could they possibly hope to accomplish or gain? But the fact that it happened at all isn’t surprising anymore. 

It also continues to be surprising that we as a nation have done so little to prevent these shootings from continuing to happen. That part continues to surprise but there’s also this feeling of hopeless, sad resignation. Like so many of us know that our country is shit and that the idea of what America means, that was fed to us as children, is a lie. What America really means is selfishness and greed. 

The religion that is at the foundation of the current America is Capitalism. And despite what you may be taught in an economic theory class, what happens in the real world is different. Human greed shapes the way capitalism works in the real world and the people on top always want more. It’s fucked up. Of course, it makes sense to want a lot of money so that you don’t have to worry about your basic needs EVER and also not just live comfortably but be able to live a life of luxury. But how much does any person actually need? How many cars can you drive? How many houses can you live in? 

The other factor that makes us impotent to create any real change on any of the issues that are slowly killing us is the mythology that has been created about what it means to be an American. The idea of “rugged individualism”. Everyone thinks of themselves as this unique, special individual. There is a stubbornness to it. I guess that goes along with America being seen as the land of opportunity. If you work hard enough, you can succeed. That’s a very individualistic idea (and also another falsehood that we’re taught about America). No one wants to give up on what they think is right because we are all supposed to have this right to individualism. 

But that doesn’t work as a collective. As a nation, we have to be able to agree or you get the shit show that we are all experiencing right now. If we never agree on anything, then nothing ever gets accomplished. Not giving up or compromising your individual belief about something plays right into that idea of what it means to be an American. To be that stubborn, rugged individual. But we all need clean water, clean air, a safe food supply, health care and on and on. Wouldn’t it make more sense to find some middle ground? To budge a little so that we can find a way that will work for most of us? 

What we’re seeing is that the answer to those questions is “NO”. Americans would rather be right. Americans would rather not compromise. Americans would rather die. 

This isn’t the Wild West. The gun culture in America is a nostalgic throw back to another time. How many people with a concealed carry permit think they’re going to draw on one of these psycho shooters and save the day? I’m not an expert on the Old West, but I’m pretty sure that it didn’t happen like that too often. Usually, the regular folk got killed or taken advantage of just like is happening now in all these mass, public shootings.

If you disagree with everything I’ve written so far but have managed to keep reading…I’m not anti-gun. I grew up in a house with guns. I used to hang out in a neighbor’s garage and shoot a pellet gun at targets (The people who are into guns are mocking me about mentioning a pellet gun but you know that any true anti-gun person thinks pellet guns are evil too). I learned how to shoot a rifle at Boy Scout camp. I watched my grandfather shoot rats in our back yard through the open kitchen window. I remember begging him to give me a chance to shoot a rat. The rifle we used in Boy Scouts only had sights and I was pretty good. My grandfather’s rifle had a scope. I was sure I wouldn’t miss. 

Here’s a couple questions: When you go to the grocery store do you think you should be in fear of getting shot? When you send your child to school do you think you should be in fear of your child getting shot? 

It just doesn’t seem like public safety should be so hard to agree on. We should be able to figure out a way to make it harder to get randomly shot in public. The people out there who like having guns probably don’t want to randomly get shot in public either, right? So how do we continue to not sort this out?

Let’s compare it to health care. We all need health care. We all not only need access to health care, we need access to affordable health care. But insurance companies are often for-profit businesses who are publicly traded on the stock market. That means their primary goal is not creating an efficient system to allow their subscribers access to affordable health care. Their primary goal is to make a profit and keep share holders happy. Sorry, but those goals are incompatible. 

The reasons we can’t agree on health care are the same reasons that we can’t agree on how to slow down gun violence. People believe in the myths about America, that I mentioned above, and what that means to be an American. And the greedy, immoral, selfish pieces of shit who are running the show know this. They are playing us. Too many Americans believe in the mythos to the detriment of their own improvement. They’re fed this bullshit about how capitalism is good for them and if they have a different type of health care system that focused on health care instead of profit it would undermine their individual chance of getting ahead through hard work. The same kind of bullshit that makes people believe that if we made it illegal to buy a machine gun it would someone diminish what it means to be an American, that their whole fucking existence would change just because every asshole couldn’t own a machine gun. How much would not owning a machine gun really change your day to day life?

I have no idea how to separate the belief in this American mythology from the facts of how our country is actually operating. How can we get people to see that these myths and American ideals are being used to keep them in their place? This is what Marx meant with the line, “religion is the opium of the people”. These myths about what it means to be an American and what capitalism means are the current opium of the American people. (Here’s a crushingly sad but relevant aside: How often do you hear about the “opioid crisis”? Americans aren’t just using religion and American mythology as an opiate to pacify their fears and anxieties. Americans are using real opiates to escape from the despair of what life in American has become for so many.) If we can’t untangle the facts from the myths we have no hope of creating change. 

For those of you without kids or who don’t spend time around kids, let me first introduce you to the birthday parade. About a year ago, when Coronamageddon began, people started driving by the home of a child, in a parade formation, to celebrate the child’s birthday since parties were no longer an option. People decorate their cars, beep their horns and all that. Initially, even the police were joining some of these parades. That’s it. That’s all there is to it, but it turns out that I have a lot of thoughts that have spun out from this.

I need to step away from the birthday parade discussion for a moment to make a confession. I am an ass. Often. Many times my initial reaction to things is negative. Over the years, I’ve realized this and I’ve learned to investigate more and a lot of times I realize that I don’t really agree with my initial reaction. This is one of those times.

When the birthday parades started, I reacted like a grumpy old man. “There we go again, spoiling these kids. It’s a pandemic. They can’t handle missing one party? I didn’t have a birthday party with a bunch of kids every year to celebrate my birthday.” And similar thoughts. But as the pandemic induced restrictions have lingered and we’re about to mark the first anniversary of the beginning of Coronamaggedon, that initial reaction seems far from being a fair judgement. If adults have been and continue to be affected mentally and emotionally by all the changes due to Covid, then of course kids are being affected too. And what’s wrong with a birthday parade anyway? (I still think the police being involved is totally ridiculous)

Exchanging a party for a parade is a show of normalcy. Everything is not on hold. We’re still going to celebrate that birthday! The celebration is still going to involve other people. It’s the basic joy of celebration for the child and everyone else involved. These parades are an example of how we have adapted to what has come our way. 

Peeling back a few more layers, it’s more than that too. We are all dealing with things we’ve never dealt with before. People are isolated. People are dealing with financial hardship. Some people are sick and even dying. At best, we’re healthy and ok financially, but we’re still isolated with few choices of how to get out of the house. These birthday parades are a physical show of support. We are not as isolated as we feel. We are in this together. We care about each other. The parades are an example of the bonds we have in our local communities and they’re a way to strengthen those bonds. It doesn’t matter who you voted for when you drive by in a birthday parade. 

Part of the fun of the parade is the variety in how people express themselves. Just like everything in life, personalities come through. Some people have balloons, some make signs and banners, some bring gifts. Some people play loud music for the occasion or beep their horn. Some people are popping out of sunroofs or riding in pickup beds. Everybody is different and the way that’s expressed in these parades adds to the experience. Shoot, if everyone thought like me there wouldn’t even be birthday parades.

We recently had a birthday parade drive by our house and it wasn’t just special for the guest of honor. It was special for all of us. I was overwhelmed by the turnout and by everyone’s enthusiasm. I was entertained by the different ways people expressed themselves. One friend drove by that I hadn’t seen in almost an entire year. I was grateful for and humbled by the connections we have in our community. When I thanked one of the other parents, he responded, “Thank you. This gave us a reason to get out of the house.” 

We never know what these silly little things might mean to other people and we don’t really know what they’ll mean to us until we experience them. But when we’re reaching out to each other and supporting each other, it’s always worth it. Especially now. 

Ok, it’s 2021. So what? If you are one of those people that was all excited for 2020 to end and 2021 to begin, how do you feel now? Less enthusiastic I’m guessing. To be fair, this is not 2021’s fault. 2021 made no promises. It was false hope. It was an excuse to be excited, an excuse to celebrate. And that’s fine but here we are now in January. 

January is a strange month in any year. It’s a fresh start but it’s kind of dull after all the activities and celebrations of November and December. And a lot of people have spent too much money and/or overindulged in food and alcohol over the past couple of months so even if it’s not a real new year’s resolution, it’s common to step back a little and slow it down for January. And it’s super cold (if you live somewhere warm…shut up). 

But this January…well, it’s still Coronamageddon. Covid is WORSE THAN EVER. Ok, by the time I’ve gotten around to publish this we are coming down off the peak but still it’s a shit show out there! It was hard enough to socialize without fear of death when it wasn’t 9 degrees with the wind chill. Sorry, friends I am not hanging with you inside. Not gonna do it. 

I’m feeling in a bit of a rut. I’m not burned out like I was back in the Fall. I’m past that now but definitely in a rut. I don’t want to talk about Covid. Either you agree that it’s serious or you don’t. Don’t want to discuss it. I don’t want to talk about the vaccine or why it’s so hard to get. It is what it is. Do you really have a better plan for getting people vaccinated? Didn’t think so. 

Don’t want to talk about politics. He who shall not be named is out. That’s good but things are still a mess, our country is still harshly divided. Things may be getting better (or not) but it’s a broken system and that’s just another depressing conversation.

I know I’m lucky to not have to worry about paying my bills but work is still a stressful grind so I don’t want to talk about that either. 

We barely leave the house so we can’t talk about what we’ve been up to. So, what the hell is there to talk about anymore? 

The gauge on my soul energy is hovering just above E. I could safely stay at home and meditate. I’m sure that would make me feel more at peace and the gauge on my soul energy would rise. But being in a rut means I don’t really have the motivation for that and even when I think about meditating, no one else ever leaves the house so it’s hard to find an alone, quiet place to just sit. Trapped. I have an answer but seem unable to implement it.

A rut is a fixed or established course of life, usually dull or unpromising. Meditation lies outside of the rut. I’d have to reach for it but I’m stuck in the rut. See how this works?

The struggle is real and it continues. The COLD weather adds a little spice to the struggle. It’s hard to find things to do. It’s hard to be active and to get the kids active. It’s hard to get fresh air and make vitamin D. It’s harder to socialize. The vicious circle is that we are isolated and it makes us feel low and when we feel low we don’t have the energy to socialize but the only antidote is to socialize.

What to do? Have you ever been ice skating and gotten your blade stuck in a rut made by someone else’s skate? Have you ever driven on an icy, snowy road and gotten your wheel stuck in another car’s tracks? You don’t get out of a rut gently. You must pick up your skate out of the rut and put it down on smooth ice. You must make a firm turn with the steering wheel to break free of the rut. Sitting around crying is for babies. 

Yes circumstances are difficult, they are less than ideal, they are not how we would like them to be. But is this really unusual? This is more extreme than the regular variety insanity we encounter in our lives but the way to handle it is the same. Assess what is happening. Discover the difficulties and challenges. But then we’ve just gotta go for it and do the best we can. Or we can sit around crying like babies. 

We all get stuck in a rut sometimes. It may take a while to realize that that’s what’s happened, but once we realize that we’re in a rut then we have the opportunity to break out of it. We get to choose. Crying just makes the groove wet. Lifting up our feet and putting them on flat ground changes our course.

I had recently been thinking about what it means to be in the moment and how it can be possible. It occurred to me that any time we are thinking about our to do list or what’s next, we are not in the moment. It’s that simple, right? If we’re thinking about the future we’re not in this moment. How much of our mental energy is focused on our to do list or thinking about what we want/need to do next? We get ahead of ourselves. We don’t operate in the current moment. How can we be in this moment when at least one eye is gazing toward the moment yet to come? It’s like a receiver in a football game taking his eye off the ball gazing down the field where he plans to run. How often have you seen a pass dropped because of that gaze ahead? After thinking about this I saw a quote by Eckhart Tolle reinforcing this idea about looking ahead. It’s been written about and talked about so many times. The volume of discussion shows how difficult it is to not think ahead and just be in the present moment.

Around the same time, I was thinking about being empty. Being empty to accept the moment. Being empty to allow the emotions and events that occur to just pass through us instead of getting stuck with us. In meditation, that is focused on the breath, we are trying to let every other thought just pass through. We are trying to create this emptiness where the only thing occupying our present is our breath. It’s just air easily passing through. If we are empty of expectations and empty of judgements and empty of the worry of “what if”, then we are open to what actually is happening. When we are empty of those expectations and judgements, then the emotions that are stirred each moment can more easily pass through and not get stuck.

I think all of this sounds great. But I am not a mystical hermit living in the wilderness. I’m in the thick of the rat race like you. I’ve been thinking about how these ideas and this approach to life can be achieved while actively participating in the rat race for many years. Parenting is an even more intense fueler of attachments and emotions. I’ve been thinking about how to apply these ideas and this approach to the life of a parent for over a decade. 

I have come to a conclusion. We can try to do it. We can try to live mindfully in this moment without shifting our gaze to the future. We can try to remain detached from the constant current of our emotions and stay empty and centered. But we will fail. The very nature of parenthood makes it impossible to not gaze ahead. It makes it even more impossible to not become overcome by our emotions. 

Children are the best AND the worst. Yin and Yang. 

Parenting is repetition. The repetition involved in parenting a child is so vast and lasts so long it’s Sisyphean. The rock just keeps rolling back down the hill. I could have the most satisfying talk with one of my children. I was calm. We were looking into each other’s eyes. I know what I was saying was understood. Then sixty seconds later it’s the same thing all over again. (picture my head smashing through a wall)

Frustration is not only a normal response here but it’s a completely justified response. Very little about parenting a child makes sense. Children are only partly rational. As much as we might remember being a child and how it felt, we are looking back at it with our rational, fully-developed adult mind. We can not really remember or know what the child’s mind is like. 

And even in those moments when we are at our best and our most patient, we are still dealing with another being. A being with their own free will. Anything can happen.

This is why we will fail to remain calmly in the moment, fail to allow our emotions to pass and instead become attached or frustrated or angry or sad or outright crazed. From now on, instead of getting more frustrated, angry or sad because of my failure, I will try to accept that failure is the only possible outcome. Now maybe I can be entertained by the consistency of my struggle and even laugh at my failure. Like the fool laughing at the truth that only he sees, I’ll be laughing as I bash my head against the wall. 

But even judging our interactions as failures requires an expectation. If we take it a step further and not just release the belief that it’s possible to stay calm and unattached while parenting, but release any ideas about what is or isn’t possible to achieve while parenting, then we’d really be making progress. Having a goal or a desired outcome creates the dichotomy of success and failure. How difficult it would be to just parent in the moment without thinking about a desired outcome. If we could really parent in the moment like that, maybe that would be the secret to the limitless patience that the repetition of parenthood requires. 

Parenting equals attachments and expectations. For anyone else, it is next to impossible to let go of attachments and expectations. For a parent, it is impossible. We can succeed when we focus on the moment instead of some unattainable idea of how we should be. Just like the cliche of finding joy in the journey instead of worrying about the destination.

After this year’s election my feelings were mixed. I was relieved that it appeared that Trump had been voted out, but I was distressed that it was so close. I am absolutely not a democrat, but I am usually anti-republican. Being anti-republican has me often voting for democrats since we’re usually only given two choices with a chance of winning. This year, particularly, I was really not wanting Trump to get reelected. 

There were many policies that I disagreed with that affected my decision, but more than any one policy, I felt that Trump had to go because of his lack of human decency. It is not naive or idealistic to think that the leader of our country should possess some decency and be able to handle him/herself with some poise in that leadership role. Trump had been explicitly divisive and had gone far past just disagreeing with the other side. He had damned, condemned and even incited violence against Americans who thought differently. He is a name-caller. Name calling, to me, is weak. It is too easy and is more a reflection of the caller than the called. His lack of compassion for HIS citizens was the most disturbing aspect of his presidency. 

This is where I got hung up after the election. That all seemed so clear to me. I understand how someone, even someone I know well and get along with, could disagree with me about this policy or that policy. But I was stuck on how anyone could think that it was ok for our leader to behave this way. How is any one policy more important than decency? How is disagreement over policies more important than our leader having compassion for all American citizens? 

These thoughts fucked me up. 

I was questioning if I was maybe losing my mind. Could I have been sucked into my own version of “fake news”? Was I only seeing information pointing me in one direction? Was I not seeing things as they really were?

But I remembered an internet post by a friend of mine just before the election. This friend is a thoughtful guy but not one to talk too much about politics or world events. Whenever I’ve tried to have conversations like that with him I don’t get much back. He keeps his focus on his own life. But he was moved to make a fairly long post before the election. His post was not about policy, it was about decency. I remembered that he was bothered by the same things I was bothered by. He felt strongly enough about it to make a political post and he is not a guy who makes political posts. Ok, I wasn’t losing my mind but I still didn’t feel good about what was going on.

Are so many people so selfish or greedy that they really didn’t give a crap about how the leader of our country behaved as long as certain policies went their way? I know that for people who are just getting by or not even getting by it’s a different story but what about everyone else? Was this just another sign that we were really splitting apart as a country? We can’t even agree that our leader should maintain a certain level of behavior?

I wasn’t feeling great heading into the election. I was burned out in general between work, Covid lingering, and all the negativity & bull shit about the election. Then after the election, instead of feeling better I was feeling worse wondering how it was possible that more people weren’t upset by Trump’s behavior. But then I started realizing that it’s always been like this. America has always been a shit show. We’re fed a bunch of nonsense propaganda our whole lives about how incredible America is but that story leaves out a lot of important details.

When our country was founded, only white male landowners were allowed to vote. How democratic does that sound? That is not a government of and for the people. It’s always been rigged. This country was founded on inequality. Not just inequality towards the color of someone’s skin but inequality based on gender and inequality based on your wealth. This is the dirty little secret. The wealthy don’t discriminate based on the color of your skin or your sexual preference or any of that. If you aren’t as rich as they are you are not one of them and they don’t give a crap about you. This is America. The board is tilted. 

These thoughts finally made me feel better. Really. Why was I so upset about what was going on or so surprised by it when it’s always been like this? These times are not special or extraordinary. These times are just like any other time. They seem worse because we’re living in it but there’s always been division in our country. The rich are always trying to keep the system rigged in their favor. There’s always some crisis we have to deal with. These times are the same but different. I was soothed by this realization. 

The America that I grew up believing in is an idea. This idea of America has always been fragile like a sand castle. It’s always in flux and something to be worked toward. Maybe we’ll get there. Maybe we won’t. Yes, we need to stay vigilant and pay attention to continue to fight against the consolidation of wealth and power. But we don’t need to feel horrible thinking this is some extra bad time in our history. It’s just another chapter in a book filled with times like these. 

2020. Wow! How my thoughts and opinion of this year have changed over the past several months.

When I first started hearing about the Corona virus, I downplayed it. Yes, it was more contagious than the flu and maybe more deadly, but it’ll turn out to be similar to the flu. That’s what I thought. I pretty quickly shifted that thinking and accepted the new facts that were coming at us. Very early on, I started calling what was happening “Coronamageddon”. I just wanted to take some of the dread away with a little humor. I was still working and we didn’t know if we’d get the virus and a lot of people weren’t wearing masks and it was stressful and Coronamageddon sounded right.

As 2020 continued to roll on and more things happened, people were talking about how horrible 2020 was and how it just kept getting worse. I was slow to get on board with that idea too. But eventually, 2020 got to me. How could it not? This has been a ridiculous year. 

Schools were closed, businesses were closed, people were only leaving their homes for groceries, sports were cancelled or postponed. Even doctors were cancelling all non-urgent appointments. Just stop and think about that. Even the gates on the outdoor tennis courts we use were locked up. That’s about as intense as anything in my lifetime (and I’m not as young as I look). 

Let’s pile the rest on now: Murder hornets. What a lovely name for an insect. This was a real thing. Murder hornets pose such a threat to other bees, our pollinators, that even 3,000 miles away, on the other side of the country, I was reading about these hornets and the scientists search for their nest(s). 

To stick with insects, how about Eastern Equine Encephalitis (EEE) in Michigan? I’ll bet a lot of the country had never heard of EEE, but here in Rhode Island we’ve known about it for years. Apparently, there were cases of EEE in Michigan and it was enough of a concern that people were told to stay inside. That’s two viruses in the same year that are a serious enough health threat that the Michigan government told people to stay home. 

You may also be aware that large portions of California and Colorado have been on fire this year. It may seem easy to dismiss the fires because it’s become more common to hear about seasonal wildfires in the West. Honestly, that in itself should be a concern, but these fires were also worse than “normal”.  I happened to be in Colorado while the fires were burning and I couldn’t see the mountains as I drove west to Boulder from Denver. If you’ve never seen the Rocky Mountains, they are real mountains. Not the stuff we have on the East coast. Those mountains should have been staring back at me on the entire drive west from the airport but they weren’t. They were hidden behind a smokey haze. 

Every year many people die and every year people die that have affected our culture or have had an impact on us personally. So, this isn’t unique to the doom of 2020 but it’s still a part of it. The list of deaths that you took notice of or were affected by will be different than mine but here’s a few lives on my mind:

Kirk Douglas

Kenny Rogers

John Lewis (As an entitled white American male, I didn’t know how important this man was until after he died.)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Tommy Heinsohn

Gerry Browe

Eddie VanHalen

Sean Connery

Toots 

Hey, how about Black Lives Matter? Yes, they certainly do matter every year, but this year a lot of non-Black people finally started thinking about what Black Lives Matter means. A lot of people started opening up their minds a little bit. But a lot of people also dug in and resisted. One of those people was our president who took the opportunity to further the divide and the hatred and the fear in our country instead of using this opportunity to further the dialogue and bring about some small bit of mutual understanding.

Then the schools reopened. Whichever side of that decision you fall on, it was an added stressor in our lives. Not just making the decision but then living with it. Be careful what you wish for. If you wanted your child home and chose that option then you got it. All the time! No more breaks from each other and get ready to be the IT department and the teacher’s assistant. If you wanted your child in school, you got that too with all the exposure to other kids, with the positive Covid results and last minute school shut downs. And Covid cases continue to peak in October and November. We are not through this and schools are open now with more cases than when the schools were shut down in the spring.

But possibly the biggest stressor this year has been politics and the election. There’s enough here for me to create an entire post just about politics. I’ve been disgusted and worried and confused and even angry. I ain’t no Republican but I ain’t no Democrat either. For me, this is not just about disagreeing on foreign policy or fiscal policy or whatever your policy priority might be. This is about what we say it means to be America. This is about decency and humanity. And part of my turmoil has been how it isn’t about that for more people. 

And we all have our own personal events that have added to the Darkness of 2020. For us, we were going to take a road trip in April down to South Carolina. Part of the trip was about seeing where my grandfather grew up. After a few years of trying to get this trip to happen, I’ve still never seen where he grew up. Still on the to do list. We were going to see a River Dogs baseball game while we were there too. They were affiliated with the Yankees. But, in true 2020 fashion, the Yankees broke ties with the River Dogs this month so even if we do get down there, in the future, we won’t be seeing a team of Yankees’ prospects. 

Much worse than the canceled road trip was getting the phone call telling me that my friend, Mark, had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. His diagnosis came early on in the Covid mess. Cancer is never good news. Pancreatic cancer is especially never good news. But blending that up with Covid has made it more complicated. It’s been more difficult for people to visit Mark and it continues to be a factor as his holiday visitors have had to cancel their travel plans due to the ever increasing number of Covid cases. 

If you kept reading because you thought I’d wrap this up with some positive tidbits or a silver lining, this is the part where I disappoint you. I’m writing about 2020! This is a piece about the Darkness that has been spreading and growing throughout the year. The Darkness that has covered us and made it hard to see the horizon. 

The only positive 2020 spin I can think of is that I’m still here to write this. I never really knew what burn out meant or felt like until now. Despite being burned out, I’m still plugging along, trying my best to snap out of it, trying to get through the day and trying to appreciate the little good moments that pop up during the day. Trying just like you are. My feelings of gratitude are helping to keep me moving forward, but they are not waking me up from the burn out. Living through this year has become like walking through mud. Each step is harder, heavier and more tiring. Even if we make it out of the mud, we won’t really be done with it. We’ll still be wet, tired, and covered in heavy mud. 

Good advice is only as good as our ability to remember it and apply it. There’s plenty of good advice out there about how to live our lives and how to handle the bumps in the road but most of it doesn’t do me much good. It just doesn’t stick with me. It’s not in the front of my mind when I need it most. I need to have a comparison. I need a picture to imagine. I imagine us all as surfers. Surfers don’t control the waves and we don’t control what we encounter throughout the day.

Surfing is a romantic notion. Riding on water. Feeling the power of nature and gliding along with it. I’ve never surfed but based on my paddle boarding experience, I’d probably be horrible. But the idea of it sticks with me.

We can be surfers. We can take what we get and find a way to ride it. Find a way to use the energy coming at us. Surfers aren’t just out there trying to ride the wave to shore, they’re trying to have fun with it and do tricks. How different would our days be if instead of looking at every bump in the road and every annoying person as a hassle to deal with, we looked at them as a wave to ride?

It’s a good comparison. Surfers can’t control the weather or the waves and we can’t control what’s coming at us or who we’ll deal with during the day. Sometimes the waves are sloppy. Sometimes they’re big. Sometimes there’s a lot of other surfers in the water that need to be avoided. Sometimes everything falls into place just the way we wanted (and we still might miss the wave). And lots of times, we may find ourselves surrounded by bumbling people barely keeping their noses above water getting thrashed against the rocks by the waves.

No one is going to catch a wave, perform a trick, turn that energy into something fun and ride it with grace unless they are focused in the moment. Aware of the energy coming at them and open to it. We can be like that in our daily lives. We can take what’s coming at us, handle it with grace and ride it to shore. We can have fun and perform tricks throughout the day instead of getting bashed against the rocks. 

It comes down to the mindset with which we enter each encounter, whether or not we accept that we can not control what’s coming at us and whether or not we are trying to transform that energy into something good and have some fun. We get to choose. Are we out there just trying to keep our heads above water, trying to survive or are we trying to take the energy coming at us and do something good with it? 

My son’s “spring” little league season ended on September 1st. They won the championship and I was glad for them. But I felt a bit of melancholy about it ending too. Would I have felt that way without the shadow of Covid over our summer? I doubt it. This baseball season felt so long but I still didn’t want it to end.

The whole summer was strange. “Spring” baseball turned into summer baseball because that’s when it was decided that it was safe to play. I was the only parent who stayed to watch the first practice. How could I have been the only parent who wanted to see what Covid baseball practice would look like? How could I have been the only parent who wanted to know if these coaches were going to take the Covid precautions seriously? I was sitting there texting different friends, asking these questions. One of my friends, who was also a coach in the same league, responded that there were all kinds of new rules due to Covid and he would be happy to explain it to me. I knew he was trying to be helpful, but I responded back, “rules are only good if people follow them”. 

Once I got used to letting my kid play baseball during Coronamageddon, it became the lifeline that got me through this unusual summer. We still had to deal with people not wearing masks at the games. It was usually just us and one other family wearing masks. And even one of the umpires didn’t wear a mask. But the good that this little league season did for our summer far outweighed the frustration. It would be such a strange summer. So many of our usual activities were unattainable. So much confusion. Information was constantly changing. We typically go to the beach as much as possible but even that wasn’t going to happen like normal this summer as towns put restrictions on who was allowed at their beaches and how many people would be allowed at the beach at the same time. 

So instead of the beach and our other normal summer activities we had little league. We had many practices. We played catch in our yard. My son really likes outfield and on many of his previous teams the outfielders were definitely neglected during practices. Not on this team. Everyone did the same drills and even though my son didn’t love it, he learned second base and third base and would play both positions in games as well as playing outfield. 

Then the games started. Major League Baseball would eventually start too. We bought the Yankees season on the MLB app. There were no concerts to go to and not really any other sporting events to watch on TV or to see in person so our summer was about little league and the Yankees. The rhythm of our summer was created by the baseball schedule. It was usually two games per week and probably a practice fit in too. And because of the condensed MLB season, there was a Yankees game on almost every night (except when they got postponed due to a positive Covid test). 

Besides having events scheduled on our calendar and live entertainment to attend, this season was a light in the Covid Darkness on a more personal level. My son grew on and off the field. I enjoy sports for so many reasons and a lot of them are about how sports relate to things off the field. How the lessons we learn in sports translate to other aspects of life. This was a good season of growth to witness and because there was so little else going on, I got to witness a lot of it. 

And then it ended and so did the summer. When the season ended we were left to face the reality of school and how that would play out. We chose to keep our kids home. It’s great to have so much time as a family while they’re doing school at home, but the flip side is that we get almost no breaks from each other. Time apart is good for any relationship. Being stuck with each other all the time lowers our threshold for frustration and annoyance. With school comes other concerns. Will they even learn much from home? Will they be self-sufficient students? What will we do when they want to play with a kid who is attending school? 

And the end of the little league season meant that the season was changing. Summer was slipping into Fall and everything was changing the way it does every year. For me, it also meant that I was about to become painfully busy at work. Our whole vibe was about to change. 

But I am grateful for the summer little league season. It got me through this Covid-stained summer.