Navigating Re-Entry
July 4, 2021
Navigating Re-Entry: More Difficult Than I Anticipated
I had a sense that there might be some challenges with re-entry after things opened up, but I miscalculated where my challenges would lie. I’m starting from the baseline of being fully vaccinated for several months now. I live in the Boston area within Massachusetts, and the latest data shows that over 62% of the population are fully vaccinated.
While these indicators are promising, there is the lurking presence of the unknowns. Many of the current guidelines about safety precautions offer some reassurances if you are a full two weeks beyond being fully vaccinated. With these less restrictive protocols, I am more open to gathering outdoors with those that I am reassured are fully vaccinated.
I’ve been meeting friends for lunch – we bring our own – to picnic tables that have been put out around the town I live in. I feel safe gathering there, but I totally underestimated the experience of carrying on a conversation with people for a couple of hours. These are people I enjoy and whose company I find uplifting and interesting, but I underestimated or didn’t plan for the amount of energy it takes to sustain my focus and engagement for that length of time.
Like many others, I’ve been zooming with others as a way of sustaining deeper human connections. Most of my Zoom calls have had more than one person present, so the energy output to enjoy a richer conversation is shared by the energy of many. But lunch one-on-one has made me more cognizant that one needs to be rested and in a calm space in order to contribute to a deeper conversation.
Once again synchronicity made another appearance in my life. My extended zoom conversations and discussions with select groups of others have helped me enter into deeper conversations in which I feel I am able to share more of myself as well as get to know others at a deeper level. An unanticipated byproduct of this rich experience is an awareness of how superficial some of the conversations are with people – friends and family – I’ve known for some time.
I believe that the friends and family members that I have in mind are capable of deeper levels of conversation and sharing, but I’m stymied of how to help that happen. I must have put my puzzlement on how to proceed out in the universe, as the next day I received an email announcing a three-part podcast, titled Seven Steps for Deepening Any Conversation, facilitated by the Irish Poet, David Whyte.
I am excited to be part of this work in order to learn how I can contribute to forming deeper connections with those who I am choosing to share my life with. Here’s a link if any of you are interested in checking it out:
If one of the major learnings I take away from the Pandemic is being more mindful of the power and opportunities associated with conversing with others, I will feel like I learned something major.
Another new, and unexpected learning is figuring out how to work with and around my own comfort levels and those of others as we re-engage. I had lunch outdoors with two other friends recently and when we first arrived, the other two were immediately hugging. I hadn’t given much thought to that gesture, but I quickly realized that I wasn’t there yet. While I am mindful of the positive reassurances of safety that follow from being fully vaccinated, I think it is reasonable to assume that there is still a lot that the scientists and medical community haven’t had time to figure out yet.
There seems to be a lot of justifiable concern over the Delta variant and that is serving as a reminder to me that I don’t have to “re-enter the pool by jumping into the deep end.” I am finding that I prefer to wade in, to monitor how I am adjusting, and paying attention to see what I might learn from the re-entry process.
When lunching with my “hugging friends” I was able to comfortably let them know that I was sending them hugs and loving care but that I wasn’t at a place yet where I was comfortable physically hugging.
Another part of an unanticipated re-learning curve for me has to do with driving. I drive a standard shift, and my Subaru has 6 forward gears. For the last 15 months, I’ve been driving mostly on local, town roads, so I’ve relied on mostly three gears. I had reason to be on a highway recently, and I could hear the engine pulling, telling me to shift to higher gears. I had several moments of wondering if I correctly remembered how this works. But being on a highway in the Greater Boston area offers one the opportunity to move through multiple gears as traffic slows down momentarily before picking up speed again.
If you have ever visited the Boston area, you realize that the road configurations are much different from the grid patterns found in the Midwest and other parts of the country. One of the features of living in New England is that you will often hear people refer to the backroads. Almost any trip under 25 miles offers a highway option as well as a series of very scenic backroads.
As things are slowly beginning to open up, I am finding that I have to relearn many of my backroad options. Most of these routes aren’t marked any particular way; you just have to remember when and which direction to turn. It is interesting to realize that the isolation of the past year and a half has forced many of us to relearn.
I’m hosting some friends for the extended July 4th weekend, and I had to consciously get into gear to clean and “neaten” things up a bit, plus figure out a grocery list, shop, and then plan my cooking efforts so that I wasn’t spending the bulk of their visiting time in the kitchen.
But I am finding that both my ability to “gear up” is still there, and my enthusiasm for doing the “extras” is still present as well. Having people come visit you is one of the best motivators I know to do a thorough house cleaning. A newly cleaned home brings its own rewards.
I am relieved that I haven’t lost my momentum, interest, and energy on these positive aspects of living and celebrating time with others as well as myself.
One final word is that I am getting signals that it will be some time before things go back to what we learned to expect as normal in the past. I’ve ventured briefly into a few retail stores as I needed a couple of things that I could pick up quickly. I don’t think we’ll see quite the same volume of choice that we have seen in many categories in the past. And in some cases, it may take longer to get things if they are being shipped than it did pre-Pandemic.
All of these changes are manageable and many of them will potentially lead to positive changes in our lives. Paying attention to how we may be required to navigate these changes gives us the PAUSE time to reflect on what we can learn from our experiences.
