What do you do with your life now that you don’t have to travel to and from work? Do you exercise more? Do you read more? What do you do with the time vacated by your commute? I suggest that we can use this time to lay down our plows of effort, to nourish ourselves, and to become better people.
Under our new circumstances, many of the things that have driven us towards market spending have gone away, and we are left with the activities of introverts to guide us. Many of us have turned to Amazon.com and bring in books to pass our time. We cannot visit the halls of education or public gathering places, like religious centers or coffee shops. So instead of joining together outwardly, we learn to band together through inward self-betterment. Literature and artful expression bind us together.
But this is not truly solitary, is it? The printed word fascinated humans for centuries before. Now (well, before quarantine), in an electronic age where we have lights and televisions and computers and networks, we pass our evenings looking at screens. But the soul is sometimes missing in that behavior. We look to those things to entertain, not enlighten.
“Economic slowdowns are meant for survival and self-betterment.” I was taught this as I was growing up and have practiced it for most of my adult life. The only dynamic that is different now is that we cannot gather together. Education, degrees, and lectures are verboten. The razzmatazz of our society is now a danger to us; social distancing leaves us estranged from our neighbor. Instead, there is just a lonely house, the lonely text, and the lonely reader. In our solitude, words on a page enlighten us (and entertain us, too).
I find our culture has a lot of chatter about authority. We have political approaches that argue incessantly with each other. We have churches claiming that their theological method is authoritative. We ourselves push out ideology all the time. I believe that this comes at the expense of building a deep capacity for human understanding. It’s hard to empathize with another person’s perspective when all one does is debate. This leaves us bereft of a deep understanding of other people. Instead of being richer, life become cynical spin.
Perhaps we can use this period of rest, as a human species, to understand each other and ourselves more deeply instead of attempting to conquer the world with our own personal gospel. Books facilitate that. Listening facilitates that. Contemplation facilitates that. These practices have often been forgotten in our modern busy-ness.
Much of life can be embraced through products of the arts. Social gatherings are mere icing on a rich cake. Writing, poetry (by the way, whatever happened to modern poets?), music, and literature are not just sectors of the economy; they provide nourishment to our souls. By divorcing us from some of our habits, COVID-19 has forced us to reckon with who we actually are.
How will you use a more solitary life under quarantine?