For years I’ve been writing five things I’m grateful for every day in a private journal (Day One) as a way to bring greater perspective to what really matters. During the pandemic, this became particularly important to me as all my familiar routines and connections started to become veiled by the backdrop of quarantine.
One of my favorite things about practicing gratitude is my ability to look back in time and see what I was grateful for 1, 2, 3, N years ago on a particular day. About two years ago today, I wrote that I was grateful for having the confidence to go inside a store—Microcenter—for the first time since the pandemic. I recall how good that felt, but I also look back on it now with a bit of sadness for my then-self. I was grateful not because I enjoyed the store, but because I had mustered the confidence to go inside. How could that be the thing I was grateful for? Is that really what special moments had become: waiting for things to be over, better, safer, happier, different?
The pandemic has claimed countless lives (the US just recently hit 1 million lives lost), fueled political division, and caused all kinds of hardship across the globe. Many have lost loved ones or are suffering the long-term effects of the virus—my heart goes out to all of them. For me and others, the pandemic created a different kind of loss. One I’m embarrassed to admit, but which is important to acknowledge to move past: a loss of continuity and connection.
- Continuity: It became easy to think in terms of “before” and “after” the pandemic with an oddly distorted sense of time. Sometimes it felt like time was going by too quickly, other times infinitely slowly. The starts and stops of returning to normalcy further disrupted my ability to get back to a healthier relationship with time. This created a disorienting time warp of sorts. I still remember the exact moment I said goodbye to my colleagues before heading home for what we all thought would be a couple of weeks. I remember it like yesterday, but it feels like a decade ago.
- Connection: The pandemic turned that which humans need the most—other people—into a source of fear and anxiety. I stopped seeing colleagues, friends, and family. I stopped traveling for work and pleasure. I stopped going to stores and eating inside restaurants. When I did see other people, I would dutifully distance “6 feet apart” and spend holidays and birthdays outside no matter how cold the temperature (and in Boston, it gets cold). These were never debilitating behaviors for me—just the price I paid to exist sanely and safely in this new world. But left unchecked, they insidiously and slowly began to define an unhealthy “new normal.”
Thankfully, with the rapid development and administration of miraculous vaccines, a resurgence of old and healthier norms catalyzed by pandemic fatigue, and seemingly less lethal COVID variants—continuity and connection have started to come back. Sometimes it’s easy. Other times I fight for it.
It’s worth fighting for. To live our fullest lives, we should seek continuity and human connection at whatever pace and in whatever way is right for us. No two people are on the same schedule. It can’t be rushed but it also shouldn’t be slowed. For me, that means working through discomfort and being more grateful for things that have nothing to do with overcoming pandemic-related anxiety. Things like going into the office for pizza parties and whiteboarding sessions with colleagues, dancing Salsa on the Greenway with my family and a hundred other people (pictured), or being happy about going to Microcenter not because I’ve mustered the confidence to go inside, but just because it’s my favorite computer store—an eventful nonevent.
So, what gives you the Microcenter Feels?