We Are All on a Rollercoaster

This  has nothing to do with my subject, but she always calms me down.

How are you feeling? Where are you, emotionally? Contented? Restless? Anxious? Got cabin fever, or are you grateful for unstructured time -- or both in turns? Angry at fate and fearful of what’s coming? Counting your blessings? Downright depressed? Maybe confused about what you’re feeling?

A friend said she woke up a couple days ago and felt calm, and that worried her: Had she lost her mind? Had her brain ceased to function? Where was her usual, reasonable, familiar pandemic anxiety?

And it came to me, reading her messages, that we are all on a rollercoaster, every single one of us, but we are all at different points in the looping path on any given day or even at any given moment, so while no emotion any of us feels is inappropriate, we can sometimes be impatient with each other’s expressions. But the feelings themselves are perfectly (can I use this word?) normal. Given the times. All of them.

Gratitude feels good. Anger doesn’t. Sometimes we can shift gears to get from a bad feeling to a good one, and other times we just have to ride out a sickening stretch until we get to a smoother, easier section. Despair at night, joy in the morning – or the other way around, depending on your temperament. Fear, even terror. A blue funk. The sunshiny flash of unexpected happiness, the glow of contentment, or the sweet respite of calm – unless the calm brings worries of its own, as it did for my friend. 

“I’m just tired of it.”

“I want it to be over.” 

Me, too. I’d love to return to that old expectant (false but happy) sense of security I had in early winter 2019 when looking ahead to summer 2020, lining up Thursday Evening Author guests for bookstore soirées in the Artist’s gallery! Those days of planning now seem like some kind of long-ago lost innocence.

My philosophy of life in a nutshell, which is about all of anyone’s philosophy that most people want to hear, is simple: Everything is a double-edged sword. Or, as Joni Mitchell so memorably expressed in her song “Both Sides Now,” there is an upside and downside to everything. In her lyrics, the singer looks back to her past positive impressions, compares them with present cynicism, and concludes that she doesn’t “really know” clouds, love, or life “at all.” But listen to the song. What she can’t help believing in are her “illusions,” that is, the joy and magic that she isn’t feeling in the present moment. 

Can we believe in something when we’re not feeling it, or do our feelings overpower us and create our beliefs? More specifically, can we continue to believe in hope when we're feeling hopeless?

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I started writing these thoughts and had to set them aside for a couple of days. Was I depressed or just irritable and blue? 

Depression is a family curse, so I am familiar with it, but in my experience true depression is like interior weather (not situational or caused by something in the outside world), and there’s a horrible physical component to it. I describe it as being encased in a suit of dread. Imagine it as a rigid suit of armor that you’re locked inside. So, no, I wasn’t there, thank heaven! But neither was I enveloped by contentment or anything positive. I went for a walk and dragged myself along, hardly enjoying my surroundings or a pleasantly cool desert morning.

Quite frankly, while I have a lot of happy moments or even hours, positive moods can seem pretty fragile these days. Easily dispelled. Personal contentment can evaporate in an instant with a single blast of bad news, of which there is no shortage. Which brings me back to my rollercoaster theme and its limitations. 

When you go to an amusement park and ride a rollercoaster – when one rides, I should say, because I have never been on a rollercoaster in my life – my understanding is that (1) you know approximately how long the ride will be, (2) that you'll be safe, and (3) that the car will eventually stop and you’ll be able to get out right where you started. Well, right now, these days, on the coronavirus rollercoaster, we have none of these assurances. All we have is uncertainty.

Is it any wonder our emotions are all over the map? It's easy to say we should "live in the moment" and admit our powerlessness, not so easy to maintain that attitude throughout each passing day. 

I try to make most of my posts here upbeat, to brighten readers' days, and I'm certainly not trying to bring anyone down today with reminders of what you already know, that these are damn difficult times. I just thought it might help, if you're feeling blue, to know that you're not alone in that, either. It's okay to feel bad. We all have our private storm clouds.

But if you're not feeling great this morning, I hope you will feel better this afternoon or tomorrow. As for me, I think I've got my "second wind" and can pick up my feet and go on until the next storm hits -- wherever the hell it is we're going!

Into the unknown!

Borrowed Time

And so the long winter passed. Until—at last, at last!—came the first intimations of spring. And (for all the characters concerned) a strange spring it turned out to be . . .  

-      Mary Norton, The Borrowers Avenged

In this strange spring of ours, 2020, when every day feel like Sunday, I got up at 6 a.m. this Saturday and worked outdoors on writing the entire morning – journal entry, draft of a book review, grocery list notes -- sitting with my coffee at our “new” outdoor porch table. Spring has definitely reached southern Arizona, and these days that feel like Michigan summer days call me out the door as soon as the sun is up. My son in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and sisters in northern Illinois are having grey, rainy days today. We could use a little rain here in Cochise County. The ground is much too dry. But it’s hard to complain about a clear blue sky and weather warm enough for shorts.

Yesterday I made sourdough bagels from scratch, a task that took up the better part of a day. The Artist pronounced them “Perfect!” So this afternoon, positively lounging on my laurels, I gave myself a break and only mixed up a pan of banana bread. 

Banana bread makes the house smell so delicious! And getting my baking done early in the day leaves plenty of time for a refreshing breeze to move through and cool the house. Doors and windows open! What luxury!

So now, with a good morning’s and early afternoon’s work behind me, I am relaxing with a story from the Borrowers series, perfect light reading for what feels like a summer’s afternoon. Except –

Arietty was silent…. Three human beans at least, perhaps four—perhaps even more—knew they had been here, knew they had departed, but (unless they gave the game away) there was no one, as yet, who knew they had returned.    

It was for this reason Pod had forbidden them the use of light or fire, had kept them away from the windows, and throughout the daylight hours had confined them to the miniature house. Such days, with Pod and Spiller away, could sometimes seem very long. It was late March, and three days had passed…. And still Pod and Spiller had not come.

Here in our rented ghost town cabin, the Artist and are not absolutely “confined” to the house (we have wide, open spaces all around) and need not avoid windows (people know we are here, and that’s fine). But are the days long?

My son and I discussed that question by phone recently. He says that for him a day can seem long as it’s passing, but at day’s end it seems to have gone by quickly. For me, an occasional day can seem slow in its passing, but mostly time flies by, even now, even without any kind of scheduled obligations. Making bagels, for instance – as I say, that’s a project that takes up most of a day. I meant to make them on Thursday but forgot until too late in the day, pushing the task off to Friday, which meant after a long hike through the wash with my neighbor and our dogs. As a consequence, Friday flew by, I fell asleep early, and was not up this morning until, as I say, 6 o’clock.

Writing a book review takes hours of writing and rewriting and revising before I deem it worthy to go up on my blog. Every week or two, also, I plan a serious floor scrubbing, but somehow that job can be put off day after day until finally tackled and accomplished. And while I did find a nice, clean window squeegee in one of the sheds recently (perhaps one we brought with us from Michigan in December for the car windows), I have yet to wash the windows of our little cabin. Again, day after day slips away, and the window-washing job remains on the to-do list. 

Because every day there are meals to plan and prepare and to wash up after, walks to take with Sarah, books to read, and letters to write. There are phone calls to make and texts to send and e-mail messages and Facebook comments to check and reply to. (Please note: “The language has a rule absurd/which I would call an outworn myth:/A preposition is word/you mustn’t end a sentence with.” My father loved that little rhyme.)

So the days do not hang heavy, and my hands are not idle, but still --

Pod, from where he stood, leaned forwards, placing two tired hands on the shelf above the fireplace. He bowed his head. Then, after a moment, he slowly raised it. “Homily,” he said, “I don’t want to scare you. Nor you neither, Arietty. But you got to realize that every minute we’re here, we’re in grave danger.”

The Artist and I are not in grave danger where we are, sheltering in place far from our Michigan farmhouse, and we would not be in grave danger there, either, but the necessary travel to get from Point A  in southern Arizona to Point B in northern Michigan gives us serious pause. Added to that, we ask ourselves, What's the rush? Most businesses remain closed, people are still asked to avoid unnecessary travel, and the likelihood of any kind of tourist season this summer seems slim if it's going to happen at all. These facts conspire to keep us from feeling much urgency about taking on the perils of travel until we feel good and ready.

So when we will be back? We. Don’t. Know. It’s like the question, "When will things get back to normal?" Or the question, "When will the economy recover?"  No one knows! Everything is uncertainty and speculation, and we’re all taking life one day at a time, which is the only way it can ever be taken, although in "normal" times we forget that simple truth.

Meanwhile, today I’m relaxing with the Borrowers and trying not to let too many questions about an uncertain future intrude on my escape reading, even when the reading itself keeps reminding me of the questions.

P.S. You can find my last "adventure close to home," i.e., close to the rented cabin we are calling home at present, here.