On Restarting: Time on the Clock, Time of the Mind and Micro-Rituals
So this is how the world is beginning again: not with a bang, but with a series of whimpers.
Like everyone, I’ve been trying to imagine what will constitute whatever the “new normal” will be, and trying to figure out when it’s going to get here. What I realized I’ve been wanting, and what will never come, is some Morgan Freeman-esque President of the United States to come on to a national televised address, one that we will all watch at once: not just those of us at home, but blue collar workers interrupting their daily grind, bar patrons who’ve been watching sports, passers by on the street in front of electronics stores — everyone will, for just one moment, turn to receive the news that it is finally over. The kind of thing that comes at the end of disaster films like Independence Day, the universal signal for finality.
But of course, these things do not happen. Our plucky heroes can’t just blow up the Covid-19 mothership in one fell swoop and call it a day. The disease is not going to retreat to a bunker and live out paranoid fantasies of grandeur before putting a bullet in its head, nor will it sign a humiliating document of surrender before going home. President Biden’s televised address on March 11 pinning a “return to normal” at July 4 was the closest thing we’ll get to that the real world, and as I’ve thought about it since, the slight reassurance I felt was outweighed by an acute sense of its inadequacy.
As Ben Rhodes put it on Twitter, “Watching Biden and his team marshal the resources of the federal government to ramp up supply, issue guidelines, and stamp out the pandemic really underscores just how catastrophic the federal response was until January 20th. Just tragic, historic, and unnecessary incompetence.” Large, public, communal milestones are not going to work in no small part because we simply didn’t all start this journey together. I know people who had a sense in January of 2020 that things were going to get awful, and I know people who were still trying to go about their ordinary lives into early April. Without any kind of national guidance or framing, we were left, each of us, to find our ways through the nightmare of the past year. Not just in terms of personal health and safety, but in terms of how each of us was supposed to make…
