Everybody knows this to be true, and if not, they will learn it, to their dismay: the world changes in little more than a heartbeat.
And just right now, there’s a lot of heart-beating change going on.
Eons ago now, I stood in the western desert of Nevada, looking down at my feet at a small, fat-looking horned lizard, almost invisible in the sere desert grass. He — or she, a guess — was not in any way alarmed at my presence. No panicked run for cover there, more a drunken dignified sidle away, not seemingly in any rush.
I think of that little lizard, and that desert, as I think about how much has changed since March, and how, now, six months in, it looks less and less like we’re going to be returning to the world we used to think of as normal.
I didn’t have precise plans to return to the desert. But I did have the dream of returning — I was sure I would, if for no other reason than to watch the way the evening plunges into the solid black dark, or to wake up early enough in the morning to hear, again, separate packs of coyotes sing their roll call, or maybe more accurate, perform their spread-out choir at three distinct points of the compass.
To me, that’s a great loss. But it’s far from the only great loss, and far from only happening to me.
I hope when the pandemic is finally brought under control, we find our feet as quickly as we’ve lost them. Lost them? More like had them knocked right out from under us.
It’s funny: countless numbers of people in my orbit have experienced a bevy of calamities in the past few months, from the deaths of family members to the loss of much-loved pets to the crumpling of dreams. Maybe it’s because I’m older: maybe it’s because everything seems so jarring that you suddenly start keeping count.
And while all that was happening, the world has not seemed to grow even a whit more understanding. If anything, it has seemed to have become a harder, harsher, more distant, less understanding place, where quick judgement is de rigour. There’s a backhand now instead of a hand up: I truly believe that we’ve seen what crisis does to so many people. It makes them afraid, and it makes them clutch at their own properties and lives. We’re all in this: it doesn’t always feel like we’re all in this together.
I hold real doubts now that I will get to return to that desert: the simple carved lines of stone and sand, the limited colour palate, may only be something I call up in my memory and my old photos.
We were told, you may remember, that the COVID-19 pandemic was going to be a marathon, not a sprint.
This all feels less like the marathon we were told to expect, and more like a steady forced clump towards a horizon you’re not even sure you’re going to reach.
The new normal is a smaller place, geographically and imaginatively — I think back to the bustling, pushing crowds I’ve gone through in places like Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport, and how downright terrifying an idea that is right now.
I hope that we return to a more generous, more friendly, more open and less confrontational world.
I hope when the pandemic is finally brought under control, we find our feet as quickly as we’ve lost them. Lost them? More like had them knocked right out from under us.
But I am not holding my breath. I am scrabbling like a lost little horned lizard, trying to look completely unconcerned as I try to get away.
Russell Wangersky’s column appears in SaltWire newspapers and websites across Atlantic Canada. He can be reached at [email protected] — Twitter: @wangersky.
