Wrapping my mind around the future

I am in the witness protection program, hiding from the Amish mafia, waiting for the distant day when I'll head to court to tell the sordid truth about hand-plowed sorghum fields.

I am a writer in exile, separated from my country, and lying low until the clamor over my controversial book on the Secret Lives of Mathematicians subsides and it's safe for me to show my face again.

I am a media star of unparalleled popularity, avoiding the paparazzi who stalk me at every turn --- so that every time I emerge from my mansion, I slip on a mask so that I can wend my way through my adoring fans without being recognized. 

I am a religious disciple on a spiritual quest, in humble obedience to a vow of solitude.  

Or maybe I'm just trying to imagine a long-term mind-frame for living a pandemic-structured life.  When all this started, like many people I thought of COVID-19 as a particularly noxious version of the flu.   I hugged my students good-bye and lamented the caution that had caused my college to move to remote learning.  I patted myself on the back for having a month (or two or three) of food stored in the basement.  I reluctantly prepared myself to wait this out, watch it all blow over.

And now?  

Now I have had friends who have had this disease sweep through their households.  

• "It's everything they say it is.  It's a month later, and he's still coughing."  
•  "Entire body aches; fever up and down (my highest was only 101.5); acute discomfort I describe as steel bands tightening across my middle back (fortunately those bands made no appearance also across my chest front); band tightening usually accompanied by chills".

Now, in spite of all our lockdown efforts, COVID-19 has killed twice as many people in my state--in just three months--as all the people who died of the flu in a previous year.   Did I mention that this is in spite of all our lockdown efforts?

Now I follow the conflicting news reports; among these, many scientists and public health experts (whom I trust) caution that this disease will be with us for years.  As much as we all hope that the most pessimistic outlooks turn out to be wrong, it seems misguided not to prepare for this future, in the same way we prepare for other events we don't want to happen.  In the same way we have a first aid kit and flashlights with batteries and smoke detectors and clean water stashed away, I've decided I need to have a plan for long-term social quarantine.  

Some of the plan is just tweaking strategy.  As an example:  I'd been going to our local market almost weekly for refills on our olive oil.  Can I buy olive oil by the gallon, instead of in the smaller bottles, and still do this zero waste?  (It turns out that the market is happy to fill a larger glass bottle I happened to find, and so I can support my local business, be as eco as I like, and yet enter that particular store monthly or so instead of weekly or so).  

Some of the plan is figuring out new structures to keep myself healthy.  In spite of traditional "exercise"---running 4 times a week and doing occasional Fitness Blender workouts---the fact that my daily routine has me sitting around at home instead of walking around my campus means that I'm just not getting the right kind of sunshine and regular movement that I need, and I have to figure out how to work that back in.   It's hard switching from movement as an unintentional by-product of, say, going to class or heading over to a committee meeting, to movement as a conscious and deliberate interruption to my day.  I really have to find a way to rejigger my home life.  

A lot of this plan is just mental.  When I run a race, I have learned not to think about the particular hill I'm running up, or I push too hard and end up wearing myself out.  Instead, I think to myself, "you've got an hour left.  It's 12:15; picture the minute hand sweeping all the way to 1:15; you've got to run that whole time."   In the same way, I am thinking to myself, "You are going to live this way for two years.  Think about the months going by from now to 2022.  You have to be prepared to lie low for that whole time."  For me, that gives me a way to try to pace myself, and (I hope) to avoid burning myself out.   To think about living through this in a way that allows me to take care of myself, and also to be a help as needed to those around me.  

I love the beauty and creativity that is emerging from other people making the most of this crazy situation.   Here's one of my recent favorites.  I get kinda teary toward the end . . . 

I miss you so bad, 

but I think you ought to know that

I intend to stay here for the longest time.