These are not the best of times! Whether they are the worst of times, apparently won’t be answered soon.
Fear, fear, fear, worry, worry, worry. We’re all going to be basket cases by the time this is over, assuming it is ever over. Which isn’t particularly good for our health. Irony, this pandemic has in spades.
It never good when the contours of any crisis aren’t well understood or disseminated, which is a fancy word for letting people who need to know, know. That friends, is us. It produces anxiety which long term is bad for your health. What works really well for anxiety is a good hug, which it turns out, these days, is also bad for your health.
It’s also not good for our health to be bombarded with apocalyptic judgements from all sides. If this goes on for long, it’ll destroy the economy; if we go back to business as usual it will destroy us, which might destroy the economy. Some choice. Then there’s the designation essential, which has been given to those businesses we can not do without, like hospitals, banks, gas stations, and fast food assuming there’s a drive-through. As someone I know in the fast food biz ironically noted: Now we’re essential, yet, as before, we’re paid the same, treated the same, and sometimes worse by freaked-out or angry members of the public, and by dint of being essential exposed in greater numbers than those sequestered in the opulence of their homes.
Who can’t cook for themselves.
Certainly for those of a particular economic status.
For us, and I’m, for now, in that group. I don’t necessarily like being confined to my home, I generally am because what I do, write, happens at home. And while I shouldn’t leave for unnecessary frivolities, I am saved because all those frivolities have been shut down. No writers critique group meetings, open mics or performances, bar-hopping, and the like. But, my very existence is not threatened. I have not lost my job, my income, access to medical help-if it’s not Covid-19 related, it’s been canceled-let alone having kids no longer in school milling about the house bored and antsy-mine are grown and out of the house- and on and on.
I have it pretty good. I’m simply bored and irritated at the state of things. I should come out of this in decent shape, but I fear a lot of people will not.
Yet there’s little to do but wait and be fearful.
Which isn’t healthy.
Back to Boccaccio’s The Decameron.
©2020 David William Pearce
David William Pearce, Writer 