Meeting the Moment of Our New Normal
It’s been 436 days since my world as I understood it shut down. Even as we cautiously reemerge, the world as I understood it has been irrevocably changed.
This piece originally appeared in The Swampscott Reporter.
We received the robocall from my then-first grader’s school district on March 12, 2020. It would be the first of many decisions punting his return to in-person learning. He finished first grade at home. He started second grade via Zoom. From the moment he personally stepped out of a classroom and back into one again, it had been 232 days. It would be another 162 days before he returned to his classroom five days a week.
I remember in mid-April 2020 seeing eerie photos and videos of a deserted Boston: the world and our lives on lockdown in a post-apocalyptic imagining made frighteningly real. I felt similarly in those first few days after September 11, 2001, when all U.S. air traffic was halted. I remember so vividly that overwhelming quiet and strangely, its heaviness, upon realizing how much space that was otherwise so cluttered with noise and busyness was suddenly broken open.
The pandemic has afforded us all a rare stillness, an unfettered space, a pregnant pause — the very stillness we try…
