Just Like the Astronauts

Here in Massachusetts we have been told for the past two weeks that the peak of the coronavirus will come sometime in the next two weeks. It still has not come. Or has it?

We don’t know. The rate of rise in number of infections has continued to bounce around. Some days it is lower, some days it is higher. Without knowing exactly how many tests are being administered and processed, it’s hard to make sense of these daily reportings. The number of cases and the number of deaths continue at a horrific pace, but still below the worst projections. Hospitals are still functioning. Perhaps our extreme social distancing has ‘flattened the curve’. But no one seems to be able to accurately be able to predict the timing or the amplitude of the coming peak.

Meanwhile, we go on as best we can with our daily lives of social distance. It’s as if we have all been recruited by life to be part of a giant social experiment: What happens when you cut people in a society off from physical contact with each other? Part of the answer is visible in the explosion of creative new ways of using the internet to connect with family, friends and the world around us. Virtual exercise classes, meditation, family meetings, cocktail parties and dating are now the ‘normal’ stuff of our lives.

The other impact I have noticed is a growing personal sensitivity. This sensitivity cuts both directions. I think I have been more aware of smaller things—of the pleasure of chopping vegetables and cooking food, of how much I rely on my contact with a few friends to share my ongoing story, of the number of people who make my life possible by growing and picking and transporting and stocking the food I take for granted, and of how much I love my mother.

I have also noticed that I am more sensitive than usual to the people and things around me in a not so good way. Like my issue with the weather of Wednesday. Cold days are a part of spring in New England, but Wednesday, it felt like a personal affront. Like how easily I get annoyed with the people I love most. It’s quite amazing how little things, that are usually no big deal, sometimes become the center of my attention. It’s like my skin suddenly becomes paper-thin and every contact feels like an irritation.

How did the astronauts manage those days and weeks in their tiny tin space capsules floating in space? What did the NASA training manual say to do when the way your co-astronaut was gulping their Tang began to drive you crazy? Should you tell them flat out to quit slurping like a barbarian? Or is it better to begin whistling your favorite song so you don’t hear the incessant lapping? Or perhaps begin a conversation about the weather to interrupt the guzzling? I wonder.

For me, I’m trying not to say everything that comes into my head, nor to investigate everything that might be going on behind my friend’s pained expression when I enthusiastically drink my morning coffee. I’m also trying to notice the rising and falling of the irritation itself. When I really pay attention, I’m amazed at how reactive I actually am.

Beneath the calm interior I usually imagine for myself, is wave upon and wave of rising and falling emotion. Both like and dislike constantly arise. Sometimes I hardly notice. Other times the emotion and sensation are strong. Looking closely, I find that even the most urgent arising, has a half-life and fairly quickly subsides. Irritation and annoyance are, for me, often a kind of heat that surges through my body. I feel a flooding of emotion that has a certain kind of urgency to it. This urgency rises and, if I do nothing, subsides on its own. Like a my grandson who can be screaming one moment, then get distracted by a book or a bouncing ball the next moment and seem to totally forget what the screaming was about.

Perhaps patience is just the ongoing awareness this natural process of rising and falling of emotions. Maybe we can be supported by our intention to be good and kind to those around us as we observe, rather than act on, the roller coaster of internal experience that is our birthright as humans?