My newfound delight in the smallest pleasures is unlikely to survive the resumption of normal life
The weather is warm, and we’re heading into summer, with the assumption that this one will be better than the last: freer of lockdowns, less fraught with uncertainty and with a high probability that, when we come back in September, it will be to something like regular life. This is a great feeling in almost every way, except for a nagging anxiety – that, now the end is in sight and the limbo practically over, a reckoning is finally due.
The reflex to learn something from everything is, I guess, noble and human, but let’s face it, it’s also a pain in the arse. In New York at the moment, think pieces abound on how the city might come out of the pandemic a better, more equal place. Large thoughts attend patterns of work and how they may or may not have been permanently disrupted. These are worthwhile speculations at the social and political level, but at home, on the sofa, the creeping pressure to turn the pandemic experience into a spur for “growth” and renewal – in other words, to return to the pre-pandemic assumption that every life stage must be harnessed to rampant personal improvement – brings on a certain weariness.
