When I didn’t know what to write the column about, I went to the Arts and Letters Daily website. Yeah, it’s a little powerful, snooty. But I have often found the core of an idea.
Between the Trump years, the COVID-19 crisis, racism and police killings, I never wondered what to write. Everything was hot, scary, crazy, and immediate. While visiting the Arts and Letters Daily recently, I saw a play on a book called Sick and Tired: An Intimate Story of Fatigue by Emily K. Abel. And I thought, “Okay.”
I don’t know about you, but I am hidden.
And I’m not a first aider. I am not a teacher. I am not a health worker. I have a feeling that I am not entitled to this sentence. But I am. Quite so.
As the dean of my conference, I hear people in many churches say, “If we go back …” and “When things are back to normal …” every time I bite my tongue.
It’s not because I don’t want to go back to Sunday service with a full choir, communion, and candy at coffee time. This is because “normal” wasn’t that good at first. And “normal” is definitely a thing of the past.
It is the now that we have to face. And now – even if we hopefully break away from the paralysis and misery of the pandemic – means that we have to face the grief that we would rather not acknowledge. We have to face the loss: a whole year of our life ravaged by disease, the death of those we loved, the break in the lives of loved ones. Graduations, weddings, pregnancies, funerals, all cut off, postponed or celebrated in a very subdued manner. We are not going to go back to something like “normal” because we have been saddened and tired of something blanket, unprecedented, something that has surely marked us.
In all honesty, when I read the piece about Abel’s book, I thought, “Oh man, what a bad year for your book.” She quotes, and with some accuracy, the effects of trains, telegraphs, telephones and congestion during the burgeoning industrialization of the 19th century. She discusses the move to combat fatigue in the workplace not as a means of improving worker well-being, but as an increase in productivity.
Their grim conclusion is that with the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, the campaign to reduce working hours ended with a promise to pay “an hour and a half” of overtime. And after that, both the number of hours Americans worked each week and the number of weeks they worked each year began to increase.
However, the extended period of overwork, fear and uncertainty that we have faced and are facing due to the COVID-19 pandemic cannot be legally addressed by a new pledge of a year and a half. The stimulus checks were probably a facsimile of it. The opportunity to come to Lowe to purchase a new lawnmower, however, does not address the deeper loss and grief we face – and will face.
Loss and grief make us tired. Loss and grief are not just emotional states that run like clouds. Loss and grief nestle in our body. They make us sick. They make us sad. You need healing.
So we cannot “go back” unless we lie to ourselves, which is fruitless nonsense. But if we don’t lie to ourselves, if we’re just a little bit honest with ourselves, maybe we can strive for a new “normal,” that is, we discover what it means to be compassionate – both for ourselves and for ourselves everyone else, because if this pandemic has taught us anything, there are no “others”. None at all.
Jo Page is a writer and Lutheran minister. Your email is [email protected]. Their website is at https://www.jograepage.com.
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