March 20
I’m not at work as of yesterday at 4 pm. There’s still plenty I can do at home – and so much more time without the getting ready and eating first thing, getting dressed (nope – to hot in my department to wear that – too cold outside to wear that), putting together something for lunch (not much open except for delivery), walking to work.
So, I’m going to catch up on the blogs. I checked back on some of my notes after a friend in another, less-hard-hit area wondered how seriously to take social distancing. Um…it’s only a week since they announced city facility closures, school closures, university closures. One week before that, I still had plans for an early April holiday and the opera this weekend.
I am safe. It’s only change. ~ Louise Hay
March 15 – The Ides of March
Yesterday, they decided to close all the libraries as of Monday. I am amazed at the turmoil inside that bubbles into wetness in my eyes. This is not unexpected, and it’s a good thing in many ways.
Certainly, it’s a thing that had to happen. But that past trauma…the memories arise and images of all the people who now have nowhere. It’s gut-wrenching. It’s bad. Are we going to rise as a society, as a tribe of humans, and take care of each other?
Today is not a day of accomplishment for me. There are murder mysteries to watch, pots of tea to be swallowed, and bed to be curled up in. Escape.
Writing about it now, a day later, there’s hardly a thing I remember, except going to session. Right decision, wrong decision? Our favourite pub in Galway closed its doors because it’s far too cramped for social distance, but Shannon’s is huge compared to Tig Coili. I’m glad I went. I doubt we’ll continue. There are a lot of videos of sessions, great tunes pouring out of my laptop, great craic at the other end of a camera.
Some nerd friends are setting up virtual sessions, if we can all get the right USB thingie and they can do all the right technical word things! Somehow, Tig Coili closing and sessions stopping – well, it sticks in my heart. The sessions never stop. Hurricane? Tunes in the pub. Ice storm? Tunes in the pub. Coronavirus…TUNES IN MY LIVING ROOM, DAMMIT! With or without the technology. There’s always YouTube, right?
Who else feels disconnected, walking through a thick, resistant fog, waiting to open your eyes in a familiar sunny morning, but it never happens?
There is a book, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, that’s almost constantly in my mind now. Nicholas Christakis wrote it several years ago, in the early days of social media. If you can find it in your library ebook collection, give it a try! I bought it because, for me, it was a keeper. It’s on my re-read list, now that we’re all discovering how horrifically and beautifully we are connected.
“People carry dollar bills and then exchange them person-to-person in close contact, just like they carry and exchange viruses and bacteria. If the researchers could understand the movement of money, they just might be able to learn something about the spread of SARS, flu pandemics, and other deadly diseases.”
And…
“The epidemic began on January 30, 1962, when three girls aged twelve to eighteen started laughing uncontrollably. It spread rapidly, and soon most people at the school had a serious case of the giggles. By March 18, ninety-five of the 159 pupils were affected, and the school was forced to close.
The pupils went home to their villages and towns. Ten days later, the uncontrollable laughter broke out in the village of Nshamba, fifty-five miles away, where some of the students had gone. A total of 217 people were affected.
Other girls returned to their village near the Ramanshenye Girls’ Middle School, and the epidemic spread to this school in mid-June. It too was forced to close when forty-eight of 154 students were stricken with uncontrollable laughter.
Another outbreak occurred in the village of Kanyangereka on June 18, again when a girl went home. The outbreak started with her immediate family and spread to two nearby boys’ schools, and those schools were also forced to close. After a few months, the epidemic petered out.” p 124
Of course, the laughing epidemic was, as Christakis wrote, no laughing matter. People were scared. Right now, people are scared too. What Connected teaches us is how easily and quickly we can change others’ emotions by changing our own!
“If your friend feels happy, she smiles, you smile, and in the act of smiling you also come to feel happy. In bars and bedrooms, at work and on the street, everywhere people interact, we tend to synchronize our facial expressions, vocalizations, and postures unconsciously and rapidly, and as a result we also meld our emotional states.”
I feel disconnected in this fog, and most nights there’s a tiny, passing moment when I’m not quite awake, when my mind pretends that the morning is sunny, that when I open my eyes, life will be normal, and it was all a nightmare. But, as I’ve written before and probably will again, feelings are like the weather. Take an umbrella.
Oh oh – breaking into song warning! Let a smile be your umbrella! And why not?
There, don’t you feel just a little bit better? Spread it around!