Where were you in March of 2020? When did you realize Covid was a thing that was going to disrupt life as you knew it? I was hiking in Joshua Tree, spending my days delirious at the natural beauty of the desert, unsure if I should return to New York. Each time I refreshed The Times’s coverage, it seemed more and more evident that going home would mean staying indoors for the foreseeable future.
I came back. I began working at The Times a few months later (from my living room) and soon started writing a newsletter called At Home, wherein I tried to help people lead full, cultured lives from their living rooms. It was a project intended to help people find distraction, comfort, meaning, joy, sense, commiseration and community in the midst of what felt at times like intolerable uncertainty. Here’s what to watch, read, cook, listen to, think about. You could attend this virtual disco, or this virtual poetry reading or someone’s virtual birthday party, where you’ll squint at screen after screen of squares of people you know and people you don’t, smiling and focused, so close up and so far away. Remember virtual happy hours? Remember Zoom shirts? Remember when it was weird to see your colleagues’ bedroom décor on video calls? Who would have thought Brian from analytics would choose those table lamps?
I spent so much time thinking about coping in those days. We all did. In the midst of a lot of confusion and sadness, there was creativity. Pandemic pods. Sourdough mania. Alfresco dining enabled by every conceivable form of outdoor heating element. A friend of mine started a dance troupe in her town that practiced its choreography on Zoom then performed their dances on neighbors’ lawns. Another built a bed in the back of her SUV and drove across the country, sleeping in her car. I reconnected with college pals I hadn’t spoken to in decades; once we realized how easy it was to FaceTime, it seemed ridiculous that we hadn’t been doing it all along.
Five years isn’t long enough to get perspective, not really. It’s a roundish number so it feels meaningful: a good time for retrospectives, to ask what we learned, how we’ve changed, how we haven’t. The things we swore we’d do differently once “the world opened up again” — are we doing them? I vowed more socializing, more dinner parties, more dancing, more trips, more visiting people just because. No more taking in-person contact with other humans for granted! I’d like to renew these vows, but the world opened up and so did the options. There was so much room for longing in lockdown, so much time to romanticize freedom of movement and to fantasize about the possible lives we’d lead in the future. But unless you put some kind of plan in place for executing these intentions, it was easy enough to just slide back into how it once was: Other humans are lovely at times and annoying a lot of the time and it takes effort to plan a dinner party.
