COVID-19 and the value of letting things go
Middle-age and the coronavirus arrived on my doorstep simultaneously, like two conspiring thieves in the night. Their message? A double-barreled reminder of my own mortality.
Unwelcome though these tidings were, they unlocked a useful insight. It’s a thought that had been rattling around my head for some time on, of all places, drives to the Foxhole Recycling Center. The coronavirus simply unclouded my mind.
Sigmund Freud called the Irish impervious to psychoanalysis, but he was wrong. On Saturday mornings I gather up junk around my house, load it in the bed of my pickup truck and, cathartically if nonverbally, rid myself of unnecessary baggage. These weekly runs to the Mecklenburg County dump are Irish-Catholic psychotherapy, and I rarely miss a session.
Clearly, I profit from letting go of all that burdens more than it benefits. So why not do it more often? Why constantly carry around the things that at this point smart money says I’ll never do?
This is the insight I want to share so you, Queen Citizens, might benefit from the load-lightening I’ve enjoyed. Financial markets go risk-off in times of uncertainty. I shall use the COVID-19 pandemic to go risk-off in my unattained personal goals. I name but a few:
Write my generation’s great American novel, rich in neo-naturalist phrasing? I skip thee like a flat stone skidding across the glassy water of my remaining years. Get thee out of my rucksack!
Teach myself to play guitar, then perhaps do some songwriting? Easy, Kemo Sabe. I need my son’s help turning on the Apple TV: My fretting would not be sonorous. And Kris Kristofferson called. He said he’s lost no sleep worrying of me putting a lyrical pen to paper.
Buy a retirement property for the missus and me somewhere in the Blue Ridge mountains? Sure, I’ll just sell the Rothko or the Chagall in the foyer to free up some cash. Please. I don’t have a Rothko or a Chagall. I don’t even have a foyer.
Elevate my regional birdwatching game from beginner to world-class. You don’t need binoculars to see how I like the idea of birding more than the activity itself. It rewards patience, which I lack. It also calls for a maturity that would be tested the moment I heard a fellow birder spot a red-billed oxpecker.
I’m not giving up on any of these dreams. I may realize some, or even several, of them before I join the choir invisible. But if I do it will come from a sense of spontaneous desire, not timeworn obligation.
The coronavirus has given me permission to be honest with myself and say whom am I kidding? I’m never doing that. That’s the point.
At least I think that’s the point. Maybe I am giving up, I don’t know. I’ll work it all out silently next Saturday morning, on my weekly trip to the Foxhole.