I guess enough time has passed since the start of the great COVID-19 epidemic of 2020 that I can stop and assess what I may have learned and how I may have changed, for better or worse, as a result of this unprecedented disruption of our national life.
A lot of the changes, for me, have been surprisingly positive. I would not have expected this when the whole thing started. And I'm certainly not trying to downplay the inconvenience, frustration, and – at times – depressing nature of the lockdowns. Still, I seem to have come out a little bit better for it in some ways.
For one thing, I'm doing a lot more writing than I did before. With less to distract me and fewer excuses to procrastinate, and driven in part by simple boredom, I made it my business to work on a writing project for at least a half hour every day. A half hour doesn't sound like much, and it isn't, but once I got started, I usually would go much longer than 30 minutes. I found that getting just a little bit into the project was often enough to fire my interest. I was able to write a 20,000 word novella much faster than I normally would have, merely by making a point of working on it every single day. And I'm still doing this on my new project, with good results.
the novella I wrote – a historical fantasy
Another positive change is that I found myself going back to paranormal literature and either reading new books or rereading old ones. I really hadn't done much of this in the last few years, and I feel that it does help to "raise my vibrations" and put me in a more upbeat frame of mind. I can actually feel the daily headlines and Twitter posts dragging me down in energy, focus, and willpower, while concentrating on spiritual subjects has the opposite effect. I think politics in general attracts low-vibration people who are often motivated by the "will to power" and who are happy to lie, cheat, and intimidate in order to get it. Getting too deeply involved in that area of life can be soul-deadening. This is a lesson I had probably learned before, but not quite so vividly.
Finally, I think – probably like many other people – I now have a renewed appreciation for some of the simpler things in life. Just going to a restaurant, even if I have to dine outdoors (indoor dining is not yet permitted in my state), now seems like an exciting change of pace. I'm impressed by the resilience of shopkeepers who found a way to maintain their businesses by offering curbside pickup services or, in the case of restaurateurs, setting up tents to serve customers. In some cases, these improvised outdoor dining areas are nicer than the indoor dining they've replaced – although I doubt this will remain true when the weather turns cold.
In fairness, I have to balance these positive changes with some that are not so positive. I admit I've become more cynical and less trusting of my fellow human beings, especially my fellow Americans. People seem awfully quick to accept government mandates delivered by the unilateral edict of a mayor or governor. Worse, many law enforcement officers are awfully keen to enforce these mandates in an unthinking "I'm only following orders" way. I used to think Americans would instinctively resist tyranny. Now I'm not so sure.
And I can't help but feel that a lot of people are good at sabotaging their own lives. They were remarkably quick to cast aside one of the strongest economies we've had in the last 50 years for the sake of temporarily beefed-up unemployment checks. I have the strong impression that a lot of folks just don't think very far ahead, which may explain why they don't get very far in life. And I'll confess that, while in the past I've given pretty generously to charity, more than maxing out my federal tax deduction for charitable contributions several years in a row, this year I have not been inclined to give anything at all to charity, because I'm not sure it really helps. If people are dead set on short-term thinking and self-sabotage, I doubt there's anything that I or anyone else can do for them.
The "novel coronavirus" is not likely to be the last infectious disease to hit our shores, and I wonder if this kind of extreme overreaction will become the new normal. If it does, it will be exceedingly hard to maintain our standard of living and the civil liberties we've historically taken for granted. I also wonder if our friends in Isis and Al Qaeda have noticed our growing national germophobia and are planning to take advantage of it in their own way.
So my final report is mixed. Some of what I learned from our not-yet-completed plague year has been positive and uplifting, while some other lessons have been less edifying.
How about you? Has the pandemic made you a different person? If so, on balance, has the change been for better – or worse?
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