The Great Rewrite
After the shock of the 2016 US election, I initiated an online meeting with five of my friends. We christened it the Joy Skype Club. These gatherings help us to tap into the joy that’s present in our lives no matter what else is going on. To spark our imaginations, we start with an intriguing word or phrase, often invented. After an hour of shared laughter, we leave the meeting feeling resourced.
In our first get-together since the COVID-19 crisis, we contemplated the term nodus tollens, created by John Koenig, author of The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows:
Nodus tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore—that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don’t understand, that don’t even seem to belong in the same genre—which requires you to go back and reread the chapters you had originally skimmed to get to the good parts, only to learn that all along you were supposed to choose your own adventure.
COVID-19 shook my world like it was an Etch-A-Sketch. It brutally erased the plot I thought I was living. Plans and work and finances evaporated. Anxiety mounted. I adopted new habits overnight—social distancing, hand washing, sanitizing. I made decisions about how much food to buy and how often to leave the house. I learned how to fill out my lockdown form. I bought a thermometer, flirted with panic, and embraced my inner hypochondriac.
In the space of a few days, I was living in a different genre. As my husband put it after one of his walks in a Paris from a parallel universe—no traffic, no people, no children; fresh air, gorgeous sunshine, singing birds—it’s hard to know if we are in a utopia dressed as a dystopia, or a dystopia masquerading as a utopia.
We are experiencing a collective moment of not knowing.
A shocking event pulls the rug out from under our feet and throws us into freefall, threatening our most basic human needs: safety, belonging, identity, purpose. As we tumble, certainty disappears. We have no story we can cling to. We’re unable to bridge the growing discord between our inner world and our outer experience. We lose our sense of meaning, and when we lose meaning, we lose ourselves. It can feel like death, and it can feel like the promise of rebirth. Either way, it’s damned scary.
The freefall might last seconds, hours, days, or weeks. Our mind, whose job it is to break our fall, offers up a jumble of story scraps for us to grasp on to: People are kind and compassionate. People are awful and cruel. The Coronavirus is no big deal. The Coronavirus causes extraordinary suffering. The economy will collapse. The economy will rebound. We’ll get through this together. We’ll destroy each other.
We rollercoaster between hope and fear again and again, falling, spinning, finding our balance, and then falling again.
Instinctively, we do the one thing capable of grounding us. We turn to each other. We check in. How are you? What do you need? How can I help? Will you help me? In connection, we begin to find resonance between our inner and outer worlds. We access our creativity, our resilience. Slowly, a new story starts to emerge, one that includes working from home, rethinking our businesses, socializing over Zoom, teaching our kids, and nursing our sick and our battle-weary.
In this story, we reinvent how we give and receive love. We even reinvent how we mourn and grieve. Challenged and stretched beyond our limits, asked to let go of too much, we reinvent life itself.
Scarred, changed, and bewildered, we’ll find ourselves on the other side. After we’ve surveyed the damage, tended to our wounded, and taken a thousand deep breaths, we’ll turn once again to the Magic Screen of the Etch-a-Sketch. There, informed by our hopes and fears and humbled by our journey, we’ll begin the great rewrite. And we’ll call forth the world we want to live in.
Or maybe not. I don't know for sure.
But this is the adventure I choose, a drama full of painful twists and glorious surprises, in which we finally come together in empathy and love. I hope you’ll choose it too, because the alternative is too heartbreaking to imagine.