Re-entry

When someone leaves the planet, returning is not easy. There is the desire to be back, yes, the will and yearning to have feet on terra ferma, to have hands intertwined with those who are loved. But the process of returning is risky. There is the atmosphere, the angle of descent, and the performance of the heat shield on the spacecraft. There is the landing itself. And there is the departure from a new perspective afforded by leaving the earth’s surface, the requisite return to a life that will forever be different because of the experience of suspending that life, even temporarily, while traveling outside the bounds of our planet’s gravity.

A new sense of normal must be found.

So it is with our species as we exit the first (and hopefully last) year of a pandemic. While we may not have broken the bounds of the earth’s pull in the past twelve months, we have certainly been required to witness the tearing of ties with much of what we previously considered “normal”. Too many have died; it is estimated that at least a third of Americans know someone whose life was lost to the virus. Most of rest of us have experienced fear, been tested for the virus, or have ourselves fallen ill and recovered. All of our lives have been disrupted.

How then should we re-enter the world if and when it is declared to be “post-pandemic”?

While it is easy to adopt the language of return, the perspective that we must and will get back to normal, I hope we will collectively try to do better. Because the old normal was over-rated. Yes, there are some basic daily rhythms and freedoms of movement we would all like to again experience. And we should. But there were some other restrictive, unfair, and inequitable aspects of our previous life – things that remain part of our current world – which have been starkly exposed under the glare of viral illness and death. Despite many advances in science and technology, we remain, unfortunately, a flawed society, within and across our political boundaries. There are fundamental structural challenges and regrettable hatreds that continuously plague us, their impacts greater than a novel virus, their existence dramatically evident under the siege by that virus. There are widespread imbalances in human rights, in access to basic services, in social supports for fundamental human decencies, and in leadership. We are fallible; our blunders lie naked before us. We are selfish; our vulnerabilities to self-protection and personal wealth aggrandizement are visible in our response to spreading hardship. We are fearful; the collapse of our confidence in institutions and those who run them is stunning reminder of the delicate nature of the unspoken contract that helps bind us together, that protects our individual freedoms, that facilitates our ability to listen, learn, and aspire to be better.

And yet – the pandemic may still improve us. In fact, we may already have experienced such change. The outpouring of interpersonal support, often at the local levels, sometimes quietly, among people who live and work in close proximity, between those who volunteer for others and those who request help, should be acknowledged and celebrated. Many people have contributed in ways large and small to the common good. Some have done this with actions. Others through donations. And many, I would venture, through intentions, through thoughts, and through silent expressions of compassion.

How many of you have found yourselves watching and listening differently to others, even if just occasionally? How many of your neighbors, co-workers, and people you may not know have themselves listened, watched, or observed you, not in your moments of human weakness, but instead during the times when you manifested hope, generosity, and caring? Have you thought and prayed, even in the smallest of moments, for people you don’t know? Have you ever wondered how many other people on this planet have done the same? Imagine a world in which we recognize that everyone, at some level, has aspirations greater than themselves. Breathe the inspiration that comes with the possibility that all humans, even those you think are fundamentally different from you, want a better world for everyone. Hold – just for one moment – the idea in your heart that everyone knows we are all more than our individual selves.

Maybe we have all, in some way, been astronauts this past year. The pandemic has blasted us out of our routines, severing our connections with daily expectations. We may often have felt loosed, untethered, even weightless. We may have questioned the point, the very purpose, of being. While the experience may not have been something we sought, it has, perhaps, given us opportunity for new perspective. I think of my own struggles and then I try to see them from outside the earth’s atmosphere. My woes recede when I let my view hover beyond the oxygen-enriched embrace we so cherish, are invisible amidst the grandeur of the greater image and vista, blend with the totality of the events teeming across the entire planet and cosmos. I know that I cannot continue to drift weightless above and outside the consciousness that I call my life. I know that I must return to the spot within that whole that I cannot see when I watch and witness from the outside. It helps me, however, to feel the release, the freedom, of being less, of being invisible, of being a part of something I know little of and am little within. I become nothing, and everything. I feel the all within the awe.

Re-entry is necessary. And it is challenging. Yet the experience of relinquishment is steadying, strangely calming. When I surrender to the realization that so much more is possible, that so much less is necessary, I feel ready to slice back through the layers surrounding my daily breath, feel comforted by the awareness that there has never been normal, that the search for so-called normalcy is a transient grasp at the view from the ground level, not a deliberate deliverance to the majestic weightlessness of the whole. Whether or not I continue to need a mask, or to practice some other response to a virus, I can still be inspired. Whether or not you continue to need a mask, or to respond in some separate way to this same situation, I can still feel your inspiration too.

May we co-create. May we continue to take flight.