With thanks to the only Johnny O

If we’re trying to find the humor in it, a funny thing about the pandemic might be the things we told ourselves about it at the outset, my favorite being that it would be over soon (also, things about toilet paper and victory gardens).

Last March, I wrote a sign on paper retrieved from the recycling bin:

Hello!  For our safety

and yours, please leave

deliveries here, and if

necessary, please sign on our

behalf.

Thank you and take care of yourself!

😉

I cancelled a coffee and I was annoyed.

We’d stay at home. For now, we said.

Did we see the endurance test ahead?

From the onset of the pandemic, I wanted a timescale that wouldn’t come. How long did we think this would be?Every night over dinner, I asked my husband. I searched for signs in the newspaper, in rolled dice and drew tarot cards. I watched Fauci and asked the television. I wanted to know. When could we live life again?

There were no credible answers. Perhaps for lack of temporal contours, we sought symbolic ones. For my aunt, the pandemic was an accounting for our unbridled capitalism. For my sister, who was at the time living through wildfires on the U.S. west coast, it was all retribution from the natural world: Earth rising. The pandemic, to some, was the hubris of a lab experiment gone wrong (I heard in Italy? China? America?). Causal theories steeped in symbolism abounded. And for their wide divergence, for the most part, we agreed. The microscopic agent of infection was here to incarcerate us all. (For now.)

The world soon went into lockdowns and shutdowns and confinement, global health measures becoming metaphor for our captivity by virus.

“The landscape of your word,” writes poet Edouard Glissant, “is the world’s landscape.” As if in agreement, our chosen language for this pandemic has been penal, reflecting a sense of entrapment that seems to advance on all sides, closing in on our weakest openings.

In an essay written during an early lockdown, Zadie Smith puts words to something we’ve perhaps all felt: this pandemic’s hardships have been “designed to destroy [me] and only [me].” I concede this thought as my own, despite the enormity of my privilege. Suffering, Smith reminds us “has an absolute relation to the suffering individual – it cannot be easily mediated.” The solipsism of our suffering has been perpetuated by containment measures themselves.

Voices come to me.

Is it the isolation?

One voice repeats itself.

It is saying, One foot in front of the other.

It is a voice I recognize from two decades ago, the voice of Johnny O. It is offering advice for a moment in which, rather than having nowhere to go, I am meant to move far and fast. Specifically, through the finish line of a long-distance track event, the anticipation of which has me throwing up Gatorade on the grass while runners of greater composure warm-up.

The problem was the distance. Whereas short races might be just a dash down the track, distance events were a problem of their own definition. They posed the trouble of requiring endurance. Or, as American distance runner Steve Prefontaine explained, running is not necessarily about who is best, but about “who can take the most pain.”

Pain, writes Lisa Olstein, “has a way of flooding you with the present,” such that “in the moment, it is the moment and you are nowhere else except and only exactly where it puts you.” In this sense, pain is personal, proprietary and non-transferrable.

We say we feel another’s pain, but do we, truly, have this capacity? We may relate to it, but empathy, Leslie Jamison writes, requires “acknowledging a horizon of context that extends perpetually beyond what you can see.”

When you are in pain, only you can own it, and it owns you entirely.

How to really take hold of, possess, the undesirable?

A friend who is an elite distance runner tells me he rarely worries where the end is. His mindset is always incremental. What do I need to do to get through the thing I’m on now? If we break our pain down into bite-size components, it may no longer be recognizable, at least not in the same way. And so one foot in front of the other, you may eventually just run through it.

My friend, who I would not be surprised to see compete at the next Olympics, goes on to explain how his marathon training is embedded in his life’s infrastructure; daily, weekly, yearly. “It is just what I do and knowing how it fits into my plan helps me attach purpose around it.” And purpose, it seems to me, is the very thing that allows us to lose ourselves in our pain, so that suddenly, we no longer fear it.

Purposelessness might also achieve the same end. Sixteen months ago, I was admitted to the maternity ward in early labor. No, I did not want pain medication, I told the nurse, because I was in labor five weeks early and my partner was on a different continent and I’d just had a disagreement more painful than the contractions that had me throwing up at regular intervals, in the fetal position on the floor, my skin was tearing apart and soon I would be someone’s mother, and the time for sitting in my own sorrows had pretty much passed. I could not, I thought, be numb for this.

How to lose oneself in one’s own pain?

Rebecca Solnit contemplates notions of loss in writing of her expatriated ancestors’ newly American life: “Only by losing [the] past would they lose the condition of exile, for the place they were exiled from no longer existed, and they were no longer the people who had left it.” Solnit suggests that losing is the expatriate’s vehicle for finding. And if losing is painful, perhaps pain is inherently a loss, leaving in its wake something to be found.

The Latin root of the word endurance is indurare, which means to harden. It is one year and one week since my family and I went into self-imposed isolation. There are few aspects of my present life that I recognize from one year ago. My back hurts. My face is drawn. My feet are calloused. I’ve had a few bad haircuts and now rarely shave my legs. It is as if, with all this time toiling at home, rather than having become domesticated, I have grown wild.

Wild in the truest sense: last summer, I woke at sunrise and stepped outside to get laundry off a rack, only to find a bird on the ground that had flown into a glass panel and died. The sun came up the color of a clementine and thickened the air, dried the grass, lit the blue-bellied bird and warmed my skin. And I could see I was just another creature of nature, neither immune nor spared from its terrible, terrific possibilities, nor deprived from the wonder of it all.

In the losses of this pandemic, this wilderness is, perhaps, the precise thing to be found. Is it a wilderness I’ve known all along? Is it the wilderness of labor? Is it the wilderness of finishing a race, one foot in front of the other?

“Work, if we are fortunate, is rewarded with money,” writes Eula Biss, “but the reward for labor is transformation.”

If this year has been painful, if this year has felt like work, then does it offer something to be found? Far from entrapment: is it a freedom, maybe? Might it be the wilderness of an untamed state, of seeing life as a sensational endurance test, overflowing with purpose and purposelessness, to be lived one foot in front of the other?