The Tenuousness of Life

I wish I’d written more during the pandemic. So many details are forgotten. When I read someone’s essay written about that time, I remember, and it’s an extraordinary thing we lived through. How frightened we were, how uncertain the future was. How we began ordering our necessities online and having them delivered. How we sprayed it all with hydrogen peroxide while wearing masks and gloves and waited 9 minutes to put it all away. How quiet was the street, the city. How we didn’t see another person even walk by the house for a long, long time. How we hoarded toilet paper and Spam and worried when food became scarce. I read an essay today about someone having a 3 day interview for a job she wanted as a professor. Then the pandemic. Then she didn’t get the job. Then her life was reset and she wondered why she ever wanted that life. The pandemic made life real. It made us realize how tenuous life is.

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I wrote the above during Summer Brennan’s most recent Essay Camp. It was one of 5 things I wrote every day. I highly recommend Essay Camp and Summer’s Substack for writers. Something about her teaching (sharing) and writing style works perfectly for me.

I’m still thinking about how tenuous life is and how our minds skirt around the planet-wide catastrophes that can end it, like the pandemic. Last week I watched Leave the World Behind, currently on Netflix, which was very good but very disturbing because it’s easy to see how this could actually happen, unlike other dystopian movies out there. The acting and writing is exceptional, imo. Consequently, it added to my recent musings of our tenuous life on Earth. I highly recommend the movie but be aware it’s not for the faint of heart.

Today is a beautiful, sunny, coolish day in New Orleans. It’s hard to think anything bad could happen. It’s easy to push away those scary thoughts. For now, I’m glad.