Burris: COVID Days

If you are lucky enough not to be sick during a pandemic, you know, better than you knew weeks ago, how lucky you are.

By Keith Burris / The Blade
Sun, 24 May 2020 04:00:00 GMT

The coronavirus is becoming a litmus test.

The obvious way is the political way. The right wants to open up the country sooner and accept a reasonable level of risk for most people, leaving it to individuals to sort out — leaving adaptation to each person.

The left wants to protect people, especially the most vulnerable people — the sick, the old, the homeless, and people who are all three — and use the instruments of government and medicine to do so.

Both are reasonable positions.

What is not reasonable is to assume both points of view cancel each other — to assume that one of these two points of view is all and exclusively right and the other all wrong.

Someone said: It’s not a light switch. Sometimes you have to turn the lights down to see the contours. Sometimes you need a spotlight or a flashlight to see detail.

I think it is the same with our psychological response.

I know people who are very frightened and some who are depressed.

I know others who have no fear of the virus.

If that fearlessness can coexist with information and realism, I admire them.

The virus catches and spreads much faster than it slows. That’s one of the few things we know. But we don’t much more. The story is still playing out. So one hesitates to speculate on what we have learned.

Maybe not much.

The virus is not helping our politics, which one might have hoped. World War II and the Great Depression cost many lives and many fortunes. Yet the country found a greater sense of oneness and single purpose. That hasn’t happened in this testing.

And it is possible that we may emerge a more distant people — a people with no handshakes or hugs. Sounds terrible. But Japan is a society that practices social distance. It is also extraordinary polite, clean and kind.

The film director and painter David Lynch has said we will emerge from COVID-19 “a more spiritual, much kinder world.” He feels quite optimistic.

Let me follow his lead for a moment.

I think that, so far at least, COVID is making Americans more health conscious.

I don’t mean simply aware of the virus, I mean aware of their bodies — and not in the Hollywood or gym rat “feel the burn” way, either.

It has made us more aware of our individual mortality, and hence the blessings that precede it. A morning walk is a blessing. A healthy appetite is. A cold glass of water or milk is.

If you are lucky enough not to be sick during a pandemic, you know, better than you knew weeks ago, how lucky you are.

Warren Zevon was asked what he learned after he was diagnosed with cancer: “Enjoy every sandwich,” he said.

That may sound funny, or even glib. It is actually profound.

There is a wonderful passage in John Cheever’s great book Falconer, in which the narrator contemplates runners. They are quite literally running, not jogging but running, for their lives. And he sees what they are about for the first time and is moved.

Runners run to stay alive, yes. But they also run to enjoy life, to feel alive and to feel the gratitude that comes with that feeling. Grace would be one word for all of that.

More people than ever are running these days. The gyms are closed and, even when they open, temperatures will be taken, class sizes limited, masks worn. Runners are free in the air and earth, relatively free of social distance.

I think the limits on activity, for much of the time, for most people, have also resulted in a slower pace of life for many of us.

We have discovered that we don’t have to do as much in a day and maybe even that we don’t need as much — as much stuff, as much recognition, as many diversions, as much conflict.

We’ve hit a speed trap and had to slow down. This has allowed us to see more and relax our necks, shoulders, and minds, a bit.

The globe spins on.

And that is both reassuring and humbling.

The greatest space this slower pace has created is for family. Pittsburgh Roman Catholic Bishop David Zubik said something that really hit me between the eyes a few weeks ago. He said: Families are getting to know each other — “some for the first time.”

He said it so gently that I did not realize at first what a remarkable and brave insight it was.

We are mysteries to each other. But that’s no tragedy. That’s life. That’s family. The tragedy is when the mysteries go unnoticed, unremarked upon and unexplored.

In my home, two parents and three children are gathering every Sunday night, virtually. At first it was supposed to be for an hour biweekly, and we would play a board game. It evolved to two hours, sometimes two and a half, and mostly talk. Somehow it developed that each person would bring a recommended book, song, movie, or TV show to each session. And one interesting thing I’ve noticed is that the two boys don’t want to get off the line. Our daughter always kept in close touch, but previous to COVID Days, the boys could go for weeks without answering a call, never mind making one.

So the virus is changing us. And though we don’t yet know the full measure of its wages, it is true that most true blessings come not merely in disguise, but wrapped in irony and grief.

The great pastor and theologian Eugene Peterson said: “Every day I put hope on the line. I don’t know one thing about the future. I don’t know what the next hour will hold.”

Let’s keep running.

Keith C. Burris is executive editor of the Post-Gazette, and vice president and editorial director of Block Newspapers (kburris@post-gazette.com).

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