In the classic 2001 Japanese movie Spirited Away, a 10-year old girl wanders into an abandoned amusement park, which turns out to be a bathhouse for residents of the spirit world. Some are scary, some are kind, and some come in just hoping for a good spring cleaning, trailing detritus and baggage from their wanderings through the human world.
I’ve been imagining, these past few weeks, that coronavirus is a sort of spirit too. This spirit has come into my life and those of all my fellow humans, stomping around and making a mess. It’s hard to tell why it’s here or when it might go off on its way. But perhaps, I’ve been imagining, it’s trying to tell me something.
The Covid Spirit wants me to run.
One of the small blessings of this time is that my main source of stress relief and spiritual seeking – running – remains more or less intact, although I sadly can’t share it with friends. I’m blessed to live in a place where the outdoors remain open and great trails are available within a few minutes’ drive. Runners’ brains are already primed for social distance, so spending an hour or two rambling outdoors, alone, seems to fit more naturally for us than it perhaps does for others.
Moreover, this is all happening in springtime here in Colorado, just as the peaks around town are losing their snowcaps and becoming passable, and as it is becoming downright pleasurable to spend time outside.
I’m not sure when our social runs and races will come back – I’ll be quite pleased if I can run my ‘A’ race for this year, the Never Summer 100K, in late July – but running is always about more than just training. The ambiguity of this year’s race schedule is just a reminder that competing always has a degree of uncertainty, and the real joy is in putting one foot in front of the other, day after day.
It has shown me my strength in a crisis.
Times of uncertainty and hardship are difficult, but they are also rife with opportunity. I’ve become aware of many of our blessings during this particular crisis, including that we have shelter, plenty of food to eat, and clean air to drink. The challenge for me is in keeping my head together for the long race we’re all in together. This takes attention every day to remembering our own strengths, gaining confidence in our ability to make it through hard times, and practicing gratitude along the way.
Life lessons are transferable, and what we learn about ourselves now will help us at other points in our lives – just as surviving previous crisis has given me a set of tools to help me flourish today.
It’s time to budget, for real
Just before the pandemic, Lisa and I had our biannual meeting with our financial advisor. Our income increased in 2019, and that was great. But when we looked carefully at our expenses, we found we’d spent almost as much as we’d made, and barely made a dent in our savings.
Our trusty advisor told us we needed to really focus on cutting our budget in 2020, much as you might go on a sugar fast to lose weight. We nodded along, saying “sure, sure, we get the idea,” and then Lisa and I sat down together and managed to agree on a few incidental cuts.
Then Covid came. Our restaurant budget, one of our key guilty pleasures, was instantly sliced by 100%. Our inviolable travel budget: cut by 100%. Child care, gas, cocktails: all sliced to virtually $0 overnight.
Once we’re able to do a bit of travelling and pop into our favorite haunts for, say, a world-class Old Fashioned, the financial lessons we’ve learned during the crisis will show us how deeply we can really cut our budget when we need to – and make us appreciate those things we do splurge on.
We’re giving the environment a much-needed break
This is a pretty weird time for humans, and there is undeniable suffering happening around the world. It’s sort of a weird time for other living creatures, too, but in a very different way. Polluted cities like Wuhan have seen historic drops in their pollution levels, while the canals of Venice, usually filthy from boat traffic, are sparkling clean. Here near Denver, which is among the 10 worst cities for air pollution in the country, the spring air is clean and the familiar inversion layer has vanished.
As a frequent air traveler and owner of a single-family house, I’m as guilty as anyone in my contribution to climate change. Now, like so many others around the world, I’ve been forced to cut my emissions. Perhaps the Covid spirit is giving our species a little nudge to help us see how we might get on track with the foremost issue that faces us in the 21st century.
