My pandemic year: A status report
Skipper on one of his long, snowy, pandemic walks.
Posted March 4, 2021, by Melanie Goodman
It’s March 2021. It’s been a whole year of pandemic-induced isolation, hardship and angst. Now, just as I was settling into an ongoing professional and social life on Zoom, there’s hope for a reopening a lot sooner than I expected.
With President Biden’s promise that all Americans will be able to access a vaccine by end of May, we might not only get a more normal-seeming summer, but have all schools ready to open this fall and parents ready to send their kids there. As a nonprofit focused primarily on young people, we’ve been among those deeply worried about the many ways the pandemic will derail young people already disconnected from mainstream opportunities. Any return to normality is an essential, if still inadequate, part of the solution for them.
Yes, this has been a hellish last year of isolation, political insanity (almost literally), and economic struggle, and it’s certainly not lost on me how incredibly lucky I am, so now — and even if it’s a bit premature — I can speak to how I am emerging. The truth is that I’m a better person.
How’s that? In the last 12 months I have:
Read soooo many great books (some of which I’ll recommend below) and tracked more miles in the woods each day with my unmasked four-legged rescue pup, Skipper. While I gave up Zoom yoga pretty early on, I’ve also finally recovered from a very long bout of bursitis, likely exacerbated by my yoga practice ;(. I’ve given lots of stuff away to shelters and food banks, given my blood to the Red Cross, and contributed to many emerging candidates across the country who have given me a reason to hope about the future of our democracy. I’ve also come to accept that even at my age, I can learn some new tricks to improve my online experience. I reconnected with lots of old friends and colleagues, and indeed, corralled about 50 of them to help us imagine the future at Youth Catalytics, which is turning 40 this year. It was a fabulous experience, and more on it later. (One outcome? If you’re reading this online, you’re seeing it: A fresh new website!)
And finally, and probably most importantly, my appreciation barometer came to life this year — it’s much more sensitive to everything around me and helping me decide where and what to spend my time on. I hope others have experienced the same; if so, we’re all a lot more grateful for the many small, good things that fill up each of our lives.
Now to some books, starting with a must-read, Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson. It introduced me to an entirely new way of understanding how this country’s origins have been fundamentally shaped by a mostly invisible caste-system paradigm that continues to influence the way we see the world and ourselves. This led me to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer. While fiction, it gave me a much better picture of the complexity of the Underground Railroad movement, and of course his writing transports you there. And most recently I stumbled onto The Midnight Library, by Matt Haig, and experienced something we all occasionally ponder – how our conscious and unconscious decisions lay down the map of our lives, which could be completely altered, but for that one decision in that one moment. And how this resonates today.
But here we are. We are looking ahead to Spring. The planet is starting to renew itself in the Northeast after a long, beautiful snowy winter. The days are getting longer. The future is looking brighter.