When Working isn’t Working in the Era of Sorrow and COVID-19
Last October, I came across Austin Kleon’s Keep Going, a wise guide geared toward honing creative focus through life’s pushbacks. I thought I had found it at a perfect time just before the holidays when life’s little encroachments always seem to gain the upper hand. In his book, Kleon advises his readers: “When you reach for your phone or your laptop upon waking, you’re immediately inviting anxiety and chaos into your life.” This excellent piece of advice has been haunting me since the arrival of COVID-19.
In March of 2020, as pockets of America slowly folded into the routine of social distancing, I resolved that I would seal my door to chaos and use my time wisely.
The upside to the slowing of the world was the gift of time. I would spin the yarn of turmoil into gold.
March progressed, but my work didn’t.
The number of infected ticked upwards, so did the number of deaths, and my enthusiasm plummeted. I tried to push through my mental blocks by rationing my news intake.
But when I still couldn’t concentrate, I blamed myself for a lack of focus or for being too undisciplined. Any drive I did have would come to me in random bursts (if you only knew how many times I tried to write this article alone) but I was always ultimately overcome by what I was trying to avoid, what I attempted to pushed away in the interest of productivity — an inescapable state of grief.
With each passing day I watched the same slow creeping sadness spread heavy over my friends, family, and perfect strangers. Uprooted from the world — many of us facing joblessness, greater financial insecurities, and barring witness to the new daily distresses — we wander around our homes and apartments trying to cope with the very sudden things that are happening to us, to people we love, to people we don’t know personally but had come to know through their public suffering. We stare off at nothing in particular, reading without absorbing, watching without observing. And in this barren state of productivity, despite the larger issues at hand, we feel shame.
Humans have a long record of countering dreary mental states with everything but acknowledging them. There’s a great dark history attached to the eradication of disorderly emotions, some of which have led to dangerous and outdated medical theories and horrific human experimentations.
To add to our troubling timeline, there’s a growing perception in the West that in grieving, we are of little use to society.
In order to be polite in society you must be useful, and sadness often hinders productivity. When we experience bouts of sadness, it must tucked away in a secret drawer meant for our eyes only because the observation of one’s sadness is/was advised to be in the engagement of the selfish and folly––an activity which bore no fruit.
In an effort to combat my own sorrow, I turned to social media to visit with the joy makers — people who seem to be able to extract optimism from any situation and have somehow mastered the art of seeing farther down the road than the rest of us.
There is a remedy that social media supplies in times like these.
But enviably, it didn’t take too long before I stumbled onto the corridor of social media where the biggest threat presently facing the world isn’t a highly contagious and deadly respiratory virus, but rather the idea that time can pass without assignment.
From the glossy online persona corner of the internet, crafted by those who seem to take on life’s biggest challenges with a spoonful of nut butter and a matte filter, is a call to move with haste in a moment that requires us to be still; they say we can arise from this crisis a more accomplished person, but only if we are worthy and don’t find ourselves distracted by despair.
Some of these messages are innocuous, delivered by the well-intentioned who keep the gospel of silver-linings at the ready for any occasion. But in every adverse situation, sure as Summer follows Spring, there are those who assume the role of modern-day snake oil salespeople, peddling productivity at all costs as an all-purpose salve meant to soothe our unique brand of emotional chaos in 2020. They represent a nicely cropped snapshot of how little we give space to our less photogenic emotions, even in the midst of a pandemic.
Finding happiness through productivity has been sold to us as an endless, fortifying, and self-renewable source, and not the by-product of hardy emotional endeavors. If we aren’t happy, we must invoke it by performing its mannerisms for the sake of our usefulness. Meanwhile sorrow should be rebuked because, like a bad houseguest, it will overstay its welcome once invited in.
The sudden impact of tragedy activates our need to lend a helping hand, to organize and congregate, but the nature of this disease requires us step back and do what we can from afar, rendering many of us “useless.” Every day we see healthcare workers, grocery store employees, day laborers, and other people working in essential positions risk their lives in service to all of us, all the while being under protected and underpaid. Virtual academic and professional workplaces are ripe grounds for unchecked hardship, despite the overlooked social, economic and psychological complications that can arise with working from home in the middle of a global crisis.
In the time before COVID-19, we were already living in a state scored by such wild agitation that a certain level of emotional distancing from current events was essential to get us through the day. For some of us, this is an art form that has been passed down from generation to generation. As our lives continue to be infiltrated by the pandemic, it has also simultaneously deepened the wounds that have festered in America long before COVID-19 — social and economic traumas that cannot — and should not — continue to be ignored. Sorrow has an important place in this. Historically, it is what follows grief that strikes the match of change.
When I wake up in the morning and I think on Kleon’s sound advice, it seems like ancient wisdom now reserved for another time all together. Today, emotional chaos no longer needs an invitation, it is omnipresent. Try as we might to push down the suffering in hopes of saving some semblance of our lives before COVID-19, to find our way back to usefulness, there is no escaping our collective grief over what we have lost (and are losing) and mourning the return of what we shut out, a grotesque truth about our culture that we have always known to be true — the value of manufacturing wealth has always outweighed the value of human life. You’re only as good as your last accomplishment.
I walked through my neighborhood the other day (while practicing the recommendations of social distancing) and I stumbled on some chalky artifacts left behind by some kids from the block. Shapes of hearts, rainbows, and little inscriptions of hope melted into the pavement near a place where there would normally be gaggles of children and parents in tow. The powdery scribbles made me think of a Hoodoo practice in which the sprinkling of rich, red brick dust at your door offers protection from harm. I realized how ritualistic it is to repel what might ail us, but sometimes there are important lessons in sorrow, we’re living through an teachable moment right now and if we numb ourselves to it, we learn nothing.
To be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with using the global pause to work on yourself and further your personal and professional goals. Your life doesn’t have to be doom and gloom at every waking minute because the world has become uncertain in new ways. Truthfully, one of the more painful lessons in life is that life does continue on in the wake of suffering and it does so without your consent. Work can fulfill a greater emotional purpose at the right time, there is healing to be found in keeping yourself busy with goal-directed undertakings. But, as anyone with depression or anxiety can tell you, performative resilience is a slippery slope and there is a big difference between working through a bit of angst and trying to out run an emotional boulder Indiana Jones style. Repression can leave us blind to the way forward.
So, if no one has told you yet, let me: you are not required to be infinitely useful during a crisis, you are only obligated to be human. Laugh when you need to and cry when it feels right. Sleep when you can. Remember the little things you accomplish throughout the day and don’t let them be swallowed up by your ambition for larger things. Work is only a fraction of your purpose. Sprinkle the proverbial brick dust at your doors and take comfort in the little joys you find in your day, whatever they may be. We are living through a period of difficult transformations (for better or for worse is anyone’s guess, I’d like to hope for better…) and it is okay to act accordingly, because the only way out now isn’t up, it’s through.
