We are currently living in between.
Two months ago we were going about our business, with routines, plans, and dreams, confident that each new day would proceed in a similar manner to the day before or to many of the days a year ago. Some of us were awake to the possibility that one day we might do something, or that something might happen to us, that would change our own personal life completely. But few of us thought that something like this pandemic would happen; something that would change the life of each person abruptly.
Many of us are hoping that we can just get through this time and come out on the other side, that one day soon our community can simply open back up for business. There actually is a pent-up demand for life the way it used to be, for a return to normal. Maybe this time is like scene shot for a movie that the director was able to cut out of the final version without disturbing the flow from the preceding scene to the following scene. Maybe our lives in 2021 will pick back up where they left off in 2019, with 2020 as an unpleasant but inconsequential outtake. In this way of thinking many 2020 events are being canceled while the tickets for this year will be good for the 2021 event. Maybe time will flow from normal through abnormal and back into normal again.
Others of us are talking about a new normal. We will need to take it slow. Little by little we will make the negotiations between our life in the time of Covid 19 and the life we had always viewed as normal. In each phase of reopening we will bring pieces of our old lives back into our current lives. California Governor, Gavin Newsom envisioned this for when we go out to eat: only half the number of tables, waiters with masks and gloves, disposable menus. Gradually we will adapt and gradually those adaptations will begin to feel like normal.
But a few of us, of whom I may be one, view this time as an opportunity to leave behind for good some of that old normal that wasn’t working very well. The in-between could become a time to discover, or create, or simply to welcome, a new way of life. Instead of asking, “How will we get back to normal?” or “What will the new normal look like?” We might ask: “What parts of our old way of doing things can we bury now and not bring with us into life after Covid 19?”
Ask not: How will we get back to normal? or What will the new normal look like? But perhaps: What parts of our old way of doing things can we bury now and not bring with us into life after Covid 19? Events 4/23/2020
One good aspect of the in-between: our world is cleaner and wilder since we have been on lockdown. Much of the natural world seems healthier and happier when we humans are not going about our normal lives. The air is noticeably and measurably clearer with fewer cars and less industry burning fossil fuels. Might we be able to bury a sizable portion of automobile-commuting in favor of telecommuting, or maybe just bury commuting for working in place?
As a Christian I tend to think about Jesus’ parable of the wineskins, “No one puts new wine into old wineskins; if he does, the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost, and so are the skins; but new wine is for fresh skins.” We might not want to try to put the new wine of life after Covid 19 into the old wineskins of “normal.” We just might want to use this time to ask what we should bury and leave behind and how we can begin to live better lives once we do open up.
In between now and then we have some free time to think some of this through.