March 6, 2021

The proverbial light at the end of the tunnel appears within sight. Someday, sooner than later, we will look upon the pandemic in the past sense.We will look upon it with distance, sadness, even some regret, and relief. We will try to unravel ourselves to see how isolation changed us. Did I make lemonade when handed lemons? Did I make the most of it? Did we enjoy the time spent with our families? Did a break from non-stop commercialism free us even a tad bit from its seductive compulsions? Did it paralyze and weaken our muscles and memories? Did it free our minds?

As I look ahead to a post-pandemic life, I must confess to a bit of whiplash and mixed emotions. The pandemic gave me the greatest excuse to indulge in a personality defect - that I like to isolate. Outside of my professional work, I tend to disengage from society. I thrive at home. A meeting at a coffee shop or attending an event can cause mild resentment in me for having to break the continuity of self immersion with a dose of real life. Of course, it is real life that informs my awareness and fills my consciousness. You can’t exist in a vacuum, except, of course, at the times when you can. Before the pandemic, I had agency in deciding when and how much to isolate. The pandemic took that away. I have taken some advantage of it, for sure. Finishing some reading, starting new writing and so on. But, I am now isolating away from illness, rather than towards wellness as the case used to be. That can make all the difference.

I have wondered what it is about writing that makes me enjoy it. At one level, I like that it is shorn of the usual adornments of life. You know, things like “a firm place to be at eight AM on a weekday,” or, “a boss who wants you to do some things.” Writing is life served neat without distraction or superstructure. It is freedom from artificial limits. Artificial limits, of course, shape and contour our lives in the sands of time and fill it with meaning. When we enter into the time warp of a pandemic, or even perhaps into that of private grief, something stops us short and we face up to their ultimate absurdity.

At some level, I write because it is a quirk of mine developed in response to personal failings. It is something to do, and it fills up time. I can’t rid myself of the need to do something or the other, at least not yet. We can’t all be like the Buddhists, sitting cross legged and meditating on ultimate matters all the time. In my case, it is an old habit that refuses to go gently into the night. Out of the vast expanse of time, I carve a little bit, which no one asked me to carve, and I do “something” with it. The difference between writing and my other work that pays the bills is that the former brings no moral anxiety with it. It bears, at best, a tenuous relationship with necessity and time. Labor is work done by the clock, and paid by it too. Writing takes time and divides it up as it sees fit. It is something to do.

But, it can’t ever meaningfully fill up time. There is really no difference between writing and baking cookies, I have realized. They are both things to do but neither is a substitute for love. By love, I don’t mean romantic love, or parental love or a familial one. I mean the Platonic version with a capital L. It exists in creation like Beauty or the color Blue. Its terms cannot be predetermined, prescheduled or preplanned by me. Love is not something to do. It is everything to be experienced. The most powerful expressions of creativity have been experiences of Love and Connection, enacted and expressed through the work itself. That must be why it frightens most of us and we resort to indirection when expressing Love. “Here are some cookies, made with love,” or, “Here is this letter, written with love.” Without an element of Love in our lives, present somewhere in some form, there really is only time and too much of it.

A woman in India has accused a distant relative of stalking and repeatedly raping her when she was a minor. The case came up for appeal in front of India’s Supreme Court, following a petition filed by the accused man after a lower court sentenced him to jail time. Justice Sharad Arvind Bobde, the Chief Justice of India’s Supreme Court, asked the man, “Will you marry her?” as an alternative to jail time. There are no reports if the Justice asked the woman for her opinion on this arrangement. I can imagine how hard it must be for a judge to avoid personal bias in decisions. Even so, the learned judge’s approach to this case reveals a clear lack of competence, and signals a deeper rot in the judicial system.