The kids that I may or not be granted in the years to come will think the coronavirus happened a really long time ago. That will be due in part to their thwarted concept of time—if you’ve only been on earth ten years, then thirty years sounds like eons. But, it will also be because of how inconceivable it is for a modern society to buckle. An analogy to how people in my generation might relate to this is the civil rights movement. It used to be, and frankly still is, mind boggling to me that the civil rights movement occurred only sixty years ago. When I was younger, not only did it seem like the 1960s were distant, but I couldn’t possibly conceive of a world wherein my own parents were contemporaries (though briefly) to Martin Luther King, Jr. and state sanctioned racism. Maybe my parents feel the same way about another event that happened just before they emerged Earth-side.
(As an aside, it helps to remind myself that the civil rights movement occurred only a couple generations ago, as I always think our society should be leaps and bounds beyond where it is now. But, change doesn’t come quickly to those who were steeped in something, no matter how backwards that something was or is.)
I’ve been taking iPhone pictures around our apartment as the days go by. I’m in here all the time and have more time to observe the space I live in. Some things I notice are nice looking and make me want to take a picture, so I do. My kitchen hasn’t been updated in maybe 50 years. I think all the cabinets and the linoleum on the floor are original. It looks old and dingy, but it is functional and has nice light. I was thinking about a photo I took if it the other day (above), and that if I were to show my kids a relic of self-isolation during the coronavirus pandemic, I might show them that picture of my kitchen. Since the kitchen is so dated, they’d likely attribute the coronavirus to a distant past, as opposed to a global landmark that helped shape the society they now live in.
When I went to therapy on my own for the first time, the therapist told me in therapist-speak that I think too much about the future. The train of thought I just described is probably an innocuous example of that.
This post is two-fold. One day the world will be older and current events will be but lines in a history textbook my kids read, but “one day” for me getting older is now. On Tuesday I turned twenty-eight. To me it sounds older than it is. Maybe because this is the age my mother was when I sprung into the world and helped her become a mom. Or, maybe it would feel older to me if I had kids of my own right now, or if I weren’t still in school. It is hard to feel old while you’re in school because people don’t always take you seriously.
Just as on birthdays past, I welcome adding one to my years. The state of the world does make it hard to reflect, as I normally would on a birthday. For now, I can only reflect on the heartache of the past few weeks. The heaviness that I have to fend off most of the time in order to get anything done catches up to me randomly as I try to go about something that looks like a normal life. The other day it was during my outside time, which I award myself each Saturday for extended periods. After moving through some yoga poses, I stopped and cried.