We are getting some tentative good news here in my beloved province. The rates of infection for Covid 19 are flattening, but we are not out of the woods yet, so we still have to wait and see. I'm enjoying the quiet, but not the anxiety. We're all being affected, liking it or not. Even if I am enjoying my bit of schadenfreude during this pandemic, now that everyone else is finally getting a dose of what those of us who live on the margins have always had to live with, I also feel a lot of compassion. Dry-eyed compassion, but compassion nonetheless.
When your butt has never been really kicked by life, and then suddenly it is getting pummeled, that is not an easy place to be in. You have not been tested yet, you are going to be weak and unprepared. Being used to getting your own way, you are suddenly being confronted with real life, and one of the tenets of real life is simply this: you are not in control. Of anything. You never will be in control and you are never going to be in control. So now your lovely middle class bourgeois illusions are being stripped away, like flimsy gauzy curtains from your lovely boutique hotel room window, and now you see that you are not facing the sea or the mountains, but the parking lot and the dumpster in the back with a junkie shooting up behind it, but still in plain view.
It is really difficult, for the pampered and cosseted, for the chronically privileged, when they have to face the hard, cold and cruel fact, that they also are going to die, and not necessarily on their terms. I think this is why clinically assisted suicide has become so popular in this country. It is particularly embraced by those who want to remain stranded in the illusion of having complete control over their lives, and their deaths. And it is so hard having to let go of this particular lie. Now with this virus being let loose in our midst, we are all vulnerable, and suddenly everyone forgets how low the mortality rate is because they are being swallowed alive by fear.
For example, today, a friend and I tried to do a safe-distancing walk together. We managed to stay sort of apart, and we are trusting that we didn't put each other at risk. Of course, some people were swerving around us, others, not so much. I always tried to hold my breath when passing someone closely, and sometimes would try to reassure them that I was holding my breath, so we're all good. then, as we were leaving the luxury neighbourhood of Shaughnessy Heights, there was one couple approaching us. I assured them that I was going to hold my breath. The man seemed okay with it, but then the woman snarkily muttered "You're supposed to distance yourself" and I replied, "I held my breath, so chill." My friend was probably a bit embarrassed by my assertiveness, but I trust that he has gotten over it, if that was a problem for him, and I really can only give him the benefit of the doubt.
Really, I am still reminded that regardless of how I react to someone else's negative reaction, they are themselves afraid. Maybe this is for them an important rite of passage, but any rite of passage is going to be scary even at the best of times. Other times, maybe the best thing to tell them is to suck it up and get over it, I mean given what privileged and indulged little rich kids so many of us tend to be. It is hard to say, and I will do what I can to be kind, but if someone's conduct appears to merit a more assertive response...I am making no promises. But kindness, first. And compassion. Please!
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