What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life? That’s the question the pandemic has made so many of us ask ourselves. If we’ve managed to make it through physically unscathed and without too much trauma, then we’ve had months to pause and ponder, what next? A writer friend posted her version of the question on Facebook recently, and I read it in an early pre-dawn hour when I couldn’t sleep because I was asking it, too: “What,” she wanted to know, “to do with the back end of my life?”
The view post-pandemic—next steps into the future.
The pandemic has brought us to our next chapters in sometimes surprising ways. People have fallen in love—with each other, with new passions, hobbies, practices, life choices. Some have jettisoned aspects of their lives that were no longer working for them. I envy their decisiveness. But I envy more the people who have fallen in love anew with the life they already have.
In the first week of March 2020, my daughter, Eva, was cast in a student movie by an NYU film grad student named Ajai. They were scheduled to film it a few weeks later but then, as we all know, New York City, and soon the world, ground to a halt.
From lock down, Eva and Ajai began to communicate via phone and Facetime—she from her one room apartment in Brooklyn, he in a larger apartment in Chelsea that his roommates had fled for safer locations with their families. Over the following months, many of Eva’s friends also left, until it must have felt to her and Ajai, each hunkered down alone, that they were the only two people left in all of New York.
They didn’t feel safe taking the subway or even an Uber to see each other, so what else could they do but continue to communicate across the East River via phone. Finally, two months later, in mid-May, when the Covid situation was coming under control in the City, they made a plan to get together. They would each walk an hour toward the other until they met on the Manhattan Bridge.
Eva had been telling me about Ajai for weeks and I knew of their plan to get together, masked and cautious. When I spoke to her the day after their meeting, I asked how it had gone. She sounded elated and then happened to mention that she was going to order dinner from one of the many restaurants nearby. A long silence filled the phone until I said, “Restaurants? There aren’t many restaurants near you in Brooklyn, are there?” She let out an embarrassed laugh. She was in Chelsea, Covid pods joined.
Now, one year later, they have moved into in a two-room bedroom rental in Brooklyn. They got it for a good price because so many people had fled the city, but not them. Instead, they stayed and found each other.
I wish for each of us, myself very much included, to have such luck and clarity and joy in our next chapters. We have come out the other side of something profound. Now, all we have to do is look around, take it in, and step forward into our new, well-chosen lives.