Late last year, Lisa and I migrated to a much bigger city.
My wife’s new job paid for the move. We rented a house with a backyard for the dog that is close enough to downtown that Lisa can bike to work. When I got to town, I immediately got a career-oriented job, too. This new role fit into my pattern of filling a series of interesting albeit entry level non-profit jobs. I worked my new gig for a few weeks and found the deep bureaucracy and endless driving to be distasteful. I quit effective immediately.
Lisa continued to go to her full-time job. I started volunteering. As a way to find like-minded folks, we’d go to lectures, movies and happy hours when Lisa got off work. Then, the coronavirus shut down the world.
Lisa now works from home. I work across the hall. From my home office I am developing my new business. The Recollection Agency allows me to use my listening, interview and audio production skills to help my customers preserve and share their life- and career-defining stories. Like Lisa’s job, my business can also be done remotely.
Since most social things aren’t really safe to do in-person right now, Lisa and I have both participated in catch-up calls with distant friends, talked online about recent reads with our book clubs and sang along at birthday parties on Zoom.
How we lived before the coronavirus and how we live with it and how we live after it are all different things. I acknowledge my privilege that lets me shelter-in-place. Many people now are not able to safely do so.
I sit and breathe into the emptiness that the pandemic has created. I meditate more and do less now. What I hear during our Great Pause is less traffic, fewer airplanes and the feeling of my heart still beating.
I have a hard time feeling settled however. I feel the need to go to an office that I no longer have. I have no job nor a boss or a matched 401K. I am figuring out how to be self-employed as the world resets itself for the post-coronavirus years. To ease the restlessness I garden and explore the urban grid by bicycle and ponder what my role here is now. My growing business is a grounding element.
These feelings of stillness – waiting for the new world to arrive – are familiar. When I was a kid, my mom would drive my brother and I to her parents’ house or to one of my aunt’s homes most summer weekdays. At the sitter’s, my cousins and I would watch Johnny Quest and CHiPs, hurdled shrubs in suburban yards, and swim at city pools and in repurposed stock tanks. I grew restless in the timelessness of these days. I recalled watching my cousins watching Wheel of Fortune, again, and wondering when my real life would start. I occasionally felt trapped in my childhood waiting for time to get us to the good stuff. I had my material needs met but often felt ready as a kid to skip the adolescence and get right to the glories of adulthood.
I can see my fourth grade gap-toothed self gazing out the wavy glass windows at my Catholic grade school as Sister Pat diagrams complex sentences on the chalkboard. I wondered when school and the numerous church services that accompanied it would finally be over. I counted only seven more years until high school graduation and felt demoralized at the interminable wait ahead for real life to begin. I finally arrived at real life sometime around 1994 and have not looked back much until now.
Today, I feel a similar emptiness as I wait for a future time with no announced ETA. Unlike my childhood feelings of waiting in limbo I am now an adult capable of making my own life choices. While I wait for whatever is coming, I build my business, visit in a socially distant manner with our neighbors and walk the dog. I wonder when life will be normal again or if this is what it is now. Where do I nominate Social distancing, PPE, intubated and curb-side pick-up as the buzziest words and phrases of 2020?
This waiting for a new world to arrive can be a gift especially when I use my time to reconnect with long-lost friends and family a few branches over on the family tree.
How are you spending this time? During the shelter-in-place days have you talked by phone or in person to any older relatives or colleagues who told you how it was ‘Back in the day?” If these stories of your earlier days are worth preserving, please contact me. I can help you clarify who you want to interview, about what. We’ll work out a when and where that works for everyone. It works to gather stories remotely if that’s what we need to do.
The Recollection Agency 