Getting ready to emerge from the car, I fumbled as I tried to find the best way to tie a scarf into a makeshift face mask. After several attempts and multiple versions, I found what I thought would be the most effective and secure layered wrap and knot. I rubbed a small amount of ever so precious hand sanitizer into my palms, pulled latex gloves over my hands, opened the door, and stepped outside. Gathering my luggage, with deep gratitude, I bid farewell to my incredibly generous and supportive line manager. We exchanged, ‘see you soons’, neither knowing how long or short that soon would be.
Walking toward the entrance of the airport, I did my best to keep physical distance from the travelers exiting the building, arriving into Belfast from locations unknown to me. Many people I initially encountered were without face masks. Crossing into the airport’s entryway, the proportions began to shift. Numerous people had the good fortune to have been able to acquire proper face masks. I had searched for such protection to no avail in nearly every chemist and shop in the small coastal town in Northern Ireland that has come to be home, now struggling to keep the scarf tied around my face from falling.
With some hours to spare before checking in for my flight, I found myself a seat as far from other people as possible and began to wait. The airport was largely deserted, save the occasional traveler, all of us trying to keep safe, holding distance from one another as we sat or wandered while waiting to check in and progress toward our desired destinations. For me, that destination was Paris. 48 hours previous, I did not imagine I would be finding myself en route to a country on lockdown and in which I have no medical insurance to live out an untold number of months during a global pandemic. Though change from one moment to the next always has been, and always will be, a constant in life, never has the rate of change felt so real and so fast as it had that week where circumstances, including my physical location on the planet, were subject to change by the hour. As my teacher said some years back, a five-syllable phrase that has held me since, ‘change with the changes.’
And so it was. No longer feasible for me to stay in Northern Ireland, there was a window of opportunity in which I could still get into France. With the country on lockdown to try to contain the spread of COVID-19, there was a role for me to support my grandmother and thus my family. My remarkable grandmother, a month shy of 100 years old, continues to live on her own with some additional care. To minimize the comings and goings and accompanying risk of exposure of her long-time carer, and unsure of how much longer the care agency would be offering services, I would serve as her carer while being provided a place to stay in the world in the face of very limited options. So there I sat, waiting to board a flight to Paris, terrified of becoming a carrier of the virus prior to self-isolating with a highly vulnerable person.
The time finally came where I could check in myself and my luggage. I moved with my possessions toward the counter. Waiting in line, I kept my distance from the people in front of me, and found myself frequently checking over my shoulder, ensuring the people behind me were at least one meter’s distance. I noticed tension growing in my neck from the strain of holding my head just so to ensure my makeshift face mask would not fall.
Consciously noting the tasks to make progress through each step of the journey, I moved through security. One of the men working behind the conveyor belt asked me to remove my scarf and jacket. I reluctantly and tenderly laid these items in the plastic bin, trying to minimize their contact with the bin’s surface. After passing through the metal detector and retrieving my belongings, I gingerly put my jacket on and retied the scarf around my face, noticing fear arising in me in not knowing if the virus had been present on previous items placed in the plastic bins.
As I encountered fellow travelers, I noticed the presence of more fear within. While I wanted to smile, to connect in the shared experience of traveling during a time of pandemic, my mouth was covered, and even so, I could feel my smile would not reach my eyes. The pain of the farewells bid in the previous hours and the fear gripping my body limited my smile to a movement of my lips.
Once boarded, I found myself in a seat in an empty row, but directly in front of other travelers. In the tight confines of airplanes, they were well within a meter of me and thus encroaching on the distance of recommended physical distancing measures. I sat in anxiety of such proximity, and asked if I could change seats, only to find myself seated directly behind another passenger. I felt frustration toward my past-self, who, when tearfully purchasing my plane ticket, did not think to choose a place with a large radius between myself and any other traveler. Resting into the seat that would hold me for the next 75 minutes, I began to focus on my breath. Receiving slow, smooth inhalations, and taking slow, smooth exhalations, I tried to calm my fragile nervous system and minimize any possible intake of unwelcome particles into my body.
When I arrived into Paris, I noticed fear arising strongly anew. Gathering with the other passengers at baggage claim to wait for our luggage to arrive, I felt my body on alert. Keeping as far away from others as possible, when anyone as much as began to walk in my direction, I would move away to try to find a what might be a safe space to wait. I waited for everyone else to leave before I gathered my luggage from the conveyor belt and began to find my way to meet my uncle, who generously came to pick me up. As we sat together in the car, both of us wearing proper face masks, my neck and shoulders finally beginning to soften after hours of holding my head still. I was grateful to be completing the journey of physical travel to my grandmother’s apartment while somewhat anxious about the journey to come.
I now find myself apartment bound in Paris, accompanying my centenarian grandmother, as we together weather the COVID-19 pandemic. Learning to self-isolate with a highly vulnerable person takes time, but I am slowly learning how to keep my grandmother and myself safe while we are in the apartment together. This entails learning a new way of being in space. I have heightened awareness of each movement I make through the apartment, conscious of each object I touch and trying to minimize this contact as much as possible. My hands are scaling and cracking from being washed so frequently, but it is a small sacrifice to assure, to the greatest possible extent, the safety of my grandmother. The greatest challenge emerges when I leave our confinement to shop for food and other necessary items, a precious outing that takes place just a couple times per week.
As I move outside into environments where there is a high risk of the virus’s presence, I am again present to great fear, especially in relationship to other people. My life experience and social position has granted me the privilege of being able to navigate through most spaces and in encounter with most people in an absence of fear. On the contrary, as I would move in public spaces, I would make efforts to smile and greet the people with whom I crossed paths with relaxed posture. Meeting people whether on a personal or professional basis, my body would be open, engaged, and soft to welcoming a new encounter. This is a privilege now lost in a city and country experiencing what may be the peak of the pandemic.
Moving about the streets in close proximity to my grandmother’s apartment, I walk the far side of the sidewalk from people, often finding myself in the vacant stretches which in previous visits to Paris would have been lined with cars bumper to bumper waiting to pass through. In shops, I avoid aisles where someone is searching for the items they need, perhaps, like many, hoping the store will not be out of stock. The narrow spaces in Paris’s grocery stores often result in me holding my breath and tightening my body as I walk within a meter of another, preferring to wait until they pass but also knowing my time is limited, as I am allowed out no more than one hour per day.
While desiring to display kindness and openness to the people I encounter in the streets and stores, the fear within me wraps me tight, not knowing what risk I am exposing my grandmother and myself to in being outside. Acknowledging that my experience of fear in encounter may be heightened resulting from the responsibility I presently hold to care for my grandmother, who is highly vulnerable, I do wonder what the lingering effects of such sustained and intense individual and collective fear will have on our social body. A pervasive fear of an invisible threat has spread globally, as people find themselves confined or otherwise physically distant to whatever extent possible on an unprecedented scale. While many people would have already been living with the unspeakable challenge of chronic fear in their daily lives, for many others, this is a new and difficult transition.
Humans are patterned creatures, our thoughts and behaviors linger and echo in our nervous systems, especially those that are repeated over time. I can only know my own isolated experience, where each encounter with a stranger now elicits fear rather than welcome. Will my nervous system become patterned to a fear response when I meet someone new, or even a friend or family member who has been operating outside my ‘safe space’? Will such fear of the unknown continue to weave through the landscape of my being? What healing process will I require when the intensity of the crisis passes? What healing process will we all require, to learn how to soften into being well together anew, if not again?
For now, I try my best, when it feels possible, to smile with my eyes at passersby. I am exploring how I can support other people in the apartment building who may be unable to go out shopping because there is too great a risk. I nurture the connections and relationships I have in the United States, Northern Ireland, France and beyond. I practice yoga asana every day, tending to my body and my breath throughout the unfolding of these days. I eagerly await the day it will be possible to embrace the people I love, knowing that day for me may be sometime after the assurance of safety is provided. I feel fortunate to know what practices are healing to my heart and to have the opportunity to regularly engage in them.
May we all come to know a practice that offers healing and connection to ourselves and others during this time of social solidarity and physical distance. May we begin the path of social healing through what is within our means today, so as to co-create a new and healing way of being well together when the day comes that we can gather again.
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