It’s hard to see things while you’re in them. New normals take hold, and it’s as if the old ones never existed. We are strangers to past versions of ourselves. Life changes fast and slowly.
I was thinking these thoughts sitting on a bench in Central Park during the first unseasonably warm day in March. It felt like spring had just released a trailer, previewing its best parts a little bit early. I wore a leather jacket not because I should have, but because I just barely could. I remembered how vital the park had been last spring and summer, how lounging in the sun in Sheep’s Meadow or balancing a bottle of wine precariously on a picnic first date had felt like just about all that could be done, and somehow gorgeous for that. Those pleasures weren’t nothing.
But they are just the barest hint of what is to come. A year of caution and loss in New York and around the country finally is showing signs of shedding its pandemic skin. A third vaccine has been approved, and the President predicts there will be enough for everyone by May. The economic data looks good, and that’s before a shot in the arm from what looks like the likely passage of a titanic stimulus package.
Here in New York, Indoor dining is back, you can go to a Knicks or Nets game and order popcorn and sit in a movie theater. We’re still in it, but there’s value in saying that the tunnel no longer feels endless and that you can squint and see the light.
Let’s be honest: there is an incredible amount of energy just waiting to be released. When enough people are vaccinated, there will be something like a tipping point. The warm weather will be a catalyst. Nobody has danced in a year. When was the last time you met someone you didn’t know? The urge to feel alive, at loose in the world and at the mercy of its wild winds is so strong. The sense of loss will only highlight the desire to eat as much of life as possible. The parenthesis of this year is just waiting to transform into an exclamation point, and maybe two or three.
It’s always been this way: celebration after battle, relief and release after war, joy after final exams. Carnival after the ravages of the Black Death. The staid 50’s gave way to the psychedelic 60’s. Weimar rocked after WWI.
I remember vividly being in a dance club in Cambridge (UK) after completing a term there, and the abandon of feeling like yesterday was a memory and tomorrow didn’t exist. After a year of virtual living and distance communicating, people will want to feel alive in their bodies again, angling to make up for the experiences that have been put on hold for a long time. None of us will get a refund on this paused pandemic year, but the opportunity to live differently is just around the corner.
I was recently talking to someone about how this next chapter will look. She paused for a moment, thought, and said simply: “it will be a bacchanal.” I think that’s about right. Of all the senses, it will be the time of touch. Every closeness will be a thrill. All of us, every one of us, will feel like survivors in one way or another. The achievement of this year, in the long arc of things, will simply be to have made it through, and to have treated others with kindness and decency along the way.
The sheer energy that lies ahead of us won’t be simply microwaved from the world before Covid. It’ll be edgy and different, colored by everything that’s happened. It might be reckless, excessive, flirting with the edge in every respect. It will force reckonings even as it delivers an escape: who is the real you who made it through? Is the person you thought you were the one who stands at the far side of 2020? We have learned the difficult realities of restraint: I wonder what will be the berserk lessons of pleasure?
The ones who will win that moment will be people who capture this swirl of energy, the possibility of a new honesty and fresh possibility backlit by the weird awfulness that came before. It might be a weird vibe or a weightless one, but either way there will be entrepreneurs and thinkers and technologies that will frame and accelerate it. There always are.
The city is teetering on the precipice of this new order. The moment feels unsteady, in between. Every person who is vaccinated seems like they’ve gained a visa to that future. Travel will no longer be a metaphor. Everything will kind of be as it was, only a little bit different. Some of us will go searching for people whom quarantine severed, and might not be sure what we’ll find. Stories will be swapped, whole months summarized with a sigh or glance. The streets will teem and the energy will throb. This, we’ll half-remember, was what it felt like to live.
Get ready for the roaring 2020’s.
A