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Last week the New York Times published a piece by a psychologist about rebooting for a better life now that the pandemic appears to be winding down in this country. The article introduced a program called Fresh Start. Participants could sign up to have prompts texted to them every day for ten days to help them rethink their lives and establish new habits, routines, and attitudes. I didn’t sign up, but I have been imagining the prompts. Do you really want to read Middlemarch? When is the last time you laundered your sweat pants? Did you figure out what oregano is and do you know how to use it to make pizza? If you have small children, are you practicing speaking in complete sentences when they are asleep? Have you made a plan yet for what to do with leftover hand sanitizer? Where did you put your boots? You have a puppy? Seriously?
While the pandemic continues to devastate communities around the world, the U.S., under intelligent and organized national leadership (sigh of relief – finally), has managed to get things under control. And with this new step forward, the psychologist writing for the NYT explains that people think of their lives in chapters and a collective chapter in ours has just ended, with a new one beginning. At the beginning of a new chapter, we have a greater capacity to establish fresh and healthier routines, both for daily living at a granular level and for our lives overall in broader strokes. Rather than returning to a vanished normal (did it ever exist?), we can rethink how we want to live our lives. We can make a Fresh Start.
I would say that I jumped the gun on this Fresh Start new chapter thing by a few months. I am emerging from the pandemic having already downsized my stuff, moved to Oregon after 43 years in my beloved California, sold that behemoth of a house, rented a little apartment, and become an on-call babysitter for the two little boys who are the center of my universe. I am entering this new reality to find myself laughing maniacally at things that a three-year-old thinks are funny (such as shouting BOO then jumping around like a deranged kangaroo) and changing five-alarm poopy diapers on a supersized toddler who eats more than I do. Not rain nor sleet nor dark-of-night nor global pandemic can keep a Jewish grandmother from her grandchildren. It took me a little while to reorganize, but here I am.
In my Fresh Start, I have a gluten-free bakery and a four-story gym with an astonishing array of shiny strength-training machines. It does not compare to the little gym I used to go to before. After not going to the gym for more than a year, I have row upon row of equipment at my disposal. If I look hard enough I will probably find a machine in there somewhere that will work the muscles in my eyelids. I have discovered bread and cinnamon rolls again at the mind-blowing gluten-free bakery. If I’m not hallucinating, I’m actually buying a challah every week. I lost ten pounds during the move, then started to gain it back in cinnamon rolls, then started to lose that off at the four-story gym. My body is so confused.
On Fridays I do a little Shabbat ceremony before dinner every week with the grandchildren. The three-year-old says “you’re setting it up” when I put the candles in the candleholders, pour the grape juice, and cover the challah. He loves to pull his chunk of challah after the blessing. Soon he’ll know the blessing by heart. The toddler pulls his chunk of challah too, and we indulge his love affair with grape juice. He points enthusiastically and shouts at the candles periodically during the evening, chitter-chattering at them in his secret language. I get to bless the children. May the spirit of the universe, that permeates all things, protect them from harm and bring them peace.
I see in the news that many wells in California are running dry and there is no rain in sight, no snow pack from a painfully dry winter. It rained here every day this week. Sad that I am for California, land that I love, I feel a greater sense of relief than I ever imagined I would feel to have fled the drought and the upcoming fire season to the South. Certainly there is summer fire danger here, but not to the extent in my previous home. My hair is curling up in this damp weather in ways it hasn’t for decades. Who am I? Who do I want to be? How long has it been since I asked myself these questions? I contemplate my options, my actions, my choices, my opportunities. Where do I want to place my focus, my time, and my energy in this Fresh Start?
I’m not bringing you astonishing news when I say that home is not a place, it’s in our hearts. Locked in the house with my husband during the pandemic, I fell in love with him all over again. Relegated to the computer screen to visit with my children, I spent more time with them than I have in years and appreciate them now more than ever; dazzled that I could have possibly raised such brilliant, compassionate, gifted human beings. Who was I to dare such a thing? How did I achieve such success? Prevented from embracing my grandsons, I quit my old life without hesitation and stepped boldly into a new one where I am present to wrap them in my arms.
I think of that Chinese character for crisis that combines characters for danger and opportunity. The pandemic brought all of us crisis. What do we do with that? What positive value do we make from it? Where do we go from here? I am grateful that I and those dear to me survived the danger, that I recognized the personal opportunity open to me, that my husband agreed with me about the nature of that opportunity, and that we seized the moment and took the leap together. This move was not easy. I feel like I suffered the hazards of the Oregon Trail to get here, metaphorically speaking; I survived versions of starvation and snakebite, having my wagon stolen (slapped around by beastly interstate movers), contending with rampant disease, being shot at by renegade train robbers, and all that. But I made it to Oregon. What a process! If you had told me one year ago that this is where I would be now, I would have laughed you off and told you to guess again.
I love my new life.
