On Small Lives

The world wants to forget Covid and embrace big, busy lives again. But what if I told you small is not the same as less?

Years ago I read a collection of essays by Doris Lessing, Prisons We Choose To Live Inside. It's a book full of interesting ideas about, among other things, sea changes in public opinion. Lessing articulately describes how disorienting it is to see a zeitgeist take hold seemingly overnight. And how frequently these majority opinions are later quietly retracted as false.

“It seems to me," she writes, "that we are being governed by waves of mass emotion, and while they last it is not possible to ask cool, serious questions. One simply has to shut up and wait, everything passes.” 

She implores independent minded people — like writers — to withstand these societal riptides, and hold fast to the truth. To resist society's groupthink when it doesn't hold up to rigorous analysis.

I have seen something similar occur in our world after 2020. Over and over again I have heard the same personal reflections on Covid's impact. It has become a kind of cri de coeur, emanating from the right and left-learning alike:

Covid was bad, they say. But really the isolation was worse.

I’ve thought a great deal about isolation in the last few years, too. But in different ways.

Like many who have experienced an epiphany about life, I struggle to describe it in ways people can understand. Sometimes the chasm between my internal world and those of others can feel uncrossable, and I fantasize about a technology that could transport my thoughts into someone else's brain so that they could truly understand what I am thinking. But no such device exists and the barriers between our ideas and someone else's ears remain mysterious and, at times, impenetrable.

And yet I want to share them. I want you to feel and know the things that I know. About isolation. About life. About how small is not the same as less. So: I will try.

Like nearly everyone who is capable of reading this essay, I experienced significant change in 2020. In the beginning of that year, we were living in a small Massachusetts city. Like many city people we lived big, busy lives — lives that were a blur of constant activity. We drove around a lot — both to go into Boston for work and in search of new, exciting places to visit. I spent a lot of time in stores and restaurants, and that rhythm of life became familiar and comforting to me. Being home felt lonely and quiet unless the TV was on to bring the bustle of the outside world into our living room.

But, then there was Covid and all of that… stopped. We decided to move full time to our fixer upper farmhouse, so we'd have more space to stretch out as the virus crept across the country. It was a radical lifestyle change to say the least, to move to a town with a population of less than 400 people. A long deferred dream, we started a successful hobby farm. We raised chickens. I began writing again, for the first time in years. And just like that, our bustling life slowed down. And we looked around with fresh eyes, finally having the time to think, to breathe.

Like most people, I expected hardship, sadness, loneliness, and boredom to come with our new life of Covid quarantine. I thought of rainy days back in our city home, of the tension I felt in my body until we left the house for the day. I feared I was standing in front of an uncertain number of days of the same. I missed the cafes, and the strangers.

I consoled myself that this was temporary and things would go back to normal, eventually. In those early days I indulged in fantasies of weddings, parties, and restaurants. I bought gift certificates for places I intended to go "as soon as this was over." And yet as the days stretched on and Spring turned to Summer, I noticed the sad, rainy day feeling I expected would come was curiously absent. I started to reconsider all those parts of "normal life" that had disappeared with Covid, and what they really meant to me.

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And here is the realization. That the real isolation was in the life I led before— the one where I worked 60 hours a week, where unopened Amazon boxes filled the hall of our house because we didn't even have time to unpack all the "fun" things we bought to distract ourselves (much less use them), where a busy restaurant drowned out the sad emptiness in my life, where everyone was friends so long as the wine was flowing. It was a life that was, at its core, unhappy. And all the things I spent so much time and energy on in those days — the things I looked forward to each week, that I would've called, perhaps, the important things — were really just crutches that got me through the day, the week, the year.

As I lost interest in those things, I nurtured the neglected core of my world: the close and intimate friendships that grew even more so in spite of physical absence. Without all the endorphin rushes I needed to power my big busy life, I finally had actual free time, so instead of buying stuff for a future hobby I'd never start, I played music for fun and worked in our garden every day. My life was busy and full, just smaller. And it was full of the things I wanted to do, the things that mattered to me. 

My perspective on work changed, too. Before Covid I had what I believed was my dream job.  It was fast-paced, full of hustle and pressure and stress, powered by near-endless cups of coffee and the feeling that I was "successful" at something. It had become a huge part of my social identity as well — the staff were young and metropolitan and I considered them friends. We had lunch together, chatted on Slack, shared beers and heart to hearts. It felt like a big and significant part of my life, not just the work but the whole environment —  the city, the projects, and all the people I worked with over the years. And yet in reality I mattered very little to that place, and when I left only one person stayed in touch with me. Our friendships just weren't very deep, it turned out, because:

You can be alone in a crowded room.

Here's a question that Covid posed to all of us. When there’s no restaurant to go out to, no wedding to dance at, no party or anniversary fete —  do you still love your spouse, love the sound of their voice and the ideas in their mind, long to be with them, when it is just the two of you? Do you still want to see your friends? Will they call just to hear your voice? Will your family visit if they have to quarantine, and can only be with you, away from the cacophony of the wider world?

It's one thing to consider these questions, another to see them play out in real time.  As Covid unbundled human connection from revelry, it became clear that some relationships were not as meaningful as I'd hoped. Others were more seriously flawed. I ended a friendship with someone because I realized they were a terrible bully, a fact hidden by the confusing jumble of life and career. I repaired friendships with their victims, and atoned for being blinded to their experience. Again, I hear that wise saying:

You can be alone in a crowded room.

It has, at various points, been very painful. But the truth is a powerful thing, and ultimately it allowed me to create space in my life for the most meaningful relationships, and give them the attention they deserve.

A smaller life has other benefits, too. Modern, big life has a kind of overwhelming hum to it — the voices of others' judgment and values are always in your ear, like thousands of conversations happening all at once. When that quieted, I could finally hear the whisper that questioned my decades-long decision not to have children. Sometimes I ask myself, what if the noise had never died down? I don't know where I would be. Again, that uncomfortable feeling of gratitude, for something so terrible.

But if you listen to the voice of the zeitgeist it wasn't Covid that was terrible, but loneliness. I think of that collective chorus muttering “isolation” as they stared out their windows. But did they ever look inside their homes, at the faces right beside them? Most were like me, living with core relationships: for me it was my husband and later, my daughter, a miracle born in the pandemic era. They are the most important people to me. My husband knows my soul in ways so deep I have no words for them, and my daughter holds my heart in her body. I could never feel isolated when I live with those who know me best and love me the most. 

Nowadays, most of the world has decided the pandemic is over. The restaurants and concerts and planes are full again. People tell me they are happy. That the "big life" — the one peppered with acquaintances and vacations — is what it means to truly live. And I remember how that felt, how much I thought those things made my life fuller, added color and excitement and joy. But — and I wish I had that magical device that could show you this truth, in your own brain — those things are not what matters in life, and often they stand in the way of the ones that do.

You can be alone in a crowded room.

It felt like there was a brief moment, early in 2020, where people were open to reevaluating their lives. At least some of them, when forced to pause the public parts of their life, expressed a greater appreciation of their core relationships. But those personal reflections were swallowed up by the zeitgeist, and now we only see op-eds about school attendance and return-to-office — as if those are the things that must be valued at all cost.

I still hate Covid. I hate how, like a thief in the night, it has snuck into the lives of virtually everyone I know. I hate that it has left trauma and death in its wake. I hate the studies that hint at long term impacts, the endless new variants, the continual waves, the abdication of responsibility from public health, the maskless healthcare workers, the suspicion of anyone who cares, the disgusted eyerolls given to the still-cautious, the abandonment of those deemed "vulnerable", the imperfect vaccines that can't prevent transmission. The deaths from the last few years. The deaths that will come from the next few. I hate it all.

And yet I am grateful for what it has shown me. As the 21st century trammels forward it is likely humanity will be faced with a need to change. Our current world values big things only — big careers, big social networks of mostly strangers, big vacations and big experiences to be collected like baubles on a shelf. As we face looming challenges with the environment, with global instability, and with disease (including Covid), maybe we should consider what we are losing, and what we have to gain. Perhaps the answer is within our front doors.