Good reader,
Our carefully managed routines—the well-crafted and pleasant comforts we rely on to calm our deepest fears and anxieties—these things are not real life.
Life of the real sort is disturbing in every sense. Real life is the phone call you don’t want to make, but know you should. Real life is the break for midday prayer that would do you good (and perhaps others) but is skipped because today has been labelled ‘unproductive.’ Why was it unproductive? We can never tell, it seems. Maybe you did something but didn’t do ‘more’ because something necessary got in the way.
Real life is a pandemic-fuelled lockdown, waiting on hold with airlines, or scrambling to stream a church service. The reality of life is found, as C.S. Lewis once said, in “what one calls the interruptions.” What are interruptions but the imposition of needs upon the little liberties we guard so jealously? The needs orbiting our lives are too often reduced to obstacles for our ambition, or desire, to overcome. Simple needs become poison to the venerated gods of productivity, and so we’re tempted to ruthlessly prune our own or to ignore others’.
I’m speaking about the inconveniences of the self-isolation and lockdown enacted against the spread of the new coronavirus. The measures aren’t yet enforced in Canada, as they are in Europe, but they could be soon. These measures present a challenge to all of us, certainly. But we are a people who enjoy unprecedented freedom, a freedom too often spent in service to ourselves (No judgement on this point. Kindness is heroic, and heroism is hard).
This, then, is the real stuff of life. The disruption and inconvenience, the discomfort with no opt-out option. What are we to do?
To start, we should accept what we’ve been given. Lewis suggests that, if we’re able, we ought “to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s own or real life.” That’s the first step. The second is to realize that, rightly considered, life is an adventure that comes to us unasked for. For the average person, there’s no planning for a pandemic, much less for pandemonium, but quiet heroism isn’t planned, it’s called upon when necessary.
In the weeks and months ahead, neighbours and acquaintances will need help. Children will need reading to, and senior citizens will need groceries, and someone will need some of that toilet paper you’ve stockpiled. Not because we’ll be living in a Hollywood apocalypse, but because our most vulnerable and burdened neighbours will need help to abide by public health and safety measures.
None of us can fight the virus. We can all help save lives, though, and support the healthcare workers who will not be watching more Netflix than usual or catching up on their reading.
Wash your hands regularly (humble soap disintegrates viruses).
Disinfect frequently touched surfaces.
Team up with some neighbours/friends to go out for groceries one by one to limit people/time in public.
Go outside if you’re healthy, but take all the precautions because someone needs you to. Your neighbour needs you to.
Relearn how to use a phone for phone calls. Social media aren’t great at letting us know how our friends and family are feeling. Nobody performs their personal brand on the phone for very long.
Get creative, but stay safe.
This is a time to exploit digital tools like social media, even as we discover that they’ve only ever been a second-best option. Use them to organize and use them to gather; do not use them to feed your anxiety; there are plenty of official and reputable channels to get your news from. The comments are always open on these letters and invite you to ask questions or share your concerns. We’ve always needed each other; that fact is simply coming into focus.
Freed, temporarily, as we are from the illusion of ‘real life’ — the one we plan out and worry over, which C.S. Lewis calls “a phantom of one’s own imagination” — we have the chance to see. There is an opportunity amidst all this uncertainty to see reality as it truly is.
G.K. Chesterton writes that “by fixing our attention almost fiercely on the facts actually before us,” we can “force them to turn into adventures; force them to give up their meaning and fulfil their mysterious purpose.” There is wonder to found in the most mundane circumstances, even in lockdown. Following public health advice doesn’t mean life stops. It just changes, and if we fix our attention on what’s before us, we will find opportunities to live real life.
I’ll close with another quote from Lewis that’s been doing the rounds in my circles recently. Commenting on life under the threat of nuclear war, Lewis observes:
If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.
There are many sensible and human things still to do that don’t require ignoring public health advice. Stay home, work if you can, read, offer help and ask for it, and stay in touch with your neighbours.
Now’s the time to love them as yourself.
-Matt
A Long Defeat, A Final Victory - Alan Jacobs
Relevant on many levels, this short post by Alan Jacobs is a kind of manifesto to virtue secured by hope — no matter how dark the circumstances.
It may be that the most important political acts I can perform do not involve siding with one of the existing parties, or even necessarily to vote at all, but to try to bear witness through word and action to this double vision of the earthly city: a long defeat followed by a longer joy.
There’s no shame in overreacting to the coronavirus - The Atlantic
To learn to live with overreactions, you must learn to tolerate waste, to embrace excess. Risking overreaction means knowing, in advance, that a particular action might be extreme and carrying it out anyway. And doing so not under a cloud of nail-biting fear that you might look a fool if it turns out wrong, but in the hopes that having done so will make it turn out right. If it does, you who overreact will earn a response even worse than the shame of looking the fool: Like the heroes of Y2K, you will enjoy no response whatsoever.
“The great thing, if one can, is to stop regarding all the unpleasant things as interruptions of one’s own or real life. The truth is of course that what one calls the interruptions are precisely one’s real life—the life God is sending one day by day. What one calls one’s real life is a phantom of one’s own imagination.”
– C.S. Lewis (Letters)
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Some fun to finish: