After spending the last two years being (overly) cautious, we finally emerged from beneath our masks today. While we had gone to the store, the mall, the doctor, and done things outside, we had not really done anything indoors that required taking off our masks. Which means we hadn’t eaten at a restaurant since March 2020. The other night we sat down and discussed it and decided that it was time. We are all vaccinated and boosted. We are all healthy. Case numbers and especially hospitalizations are very low right now. We decided that maybe we had been hermits for longer than was really necessary.
I will say that for the first year of the pandemic I was very accepting of staying home. I considered it time for a reboot. I started exercising and meditating and journaling and saw it as maybe the one time in my life I would ever be able to cocoon myself away from the world. I saw it as an opportunity. When we got our first dose of the vaccine, I thought life was beginning again. After the second dose, we went shopping, ate at a restaurant outside. We thought we were getting back to life. Then Delta. Then Omicron. We had the booster. We still didn’t feel like restaurants were the thing to do.
Lately the cocoon had started feeling like a cell. I realized that I was very depressed. I realized that I was living in the movie Groundhog Day only I wasn’t even getting to talk to other people and take piano lessons. I was waking up every day and living the same day over and over in my house. I don’t even know if I knew if it was because of covid, or if it was just a habit. So, after discussion with the rest of the family, we all decided it was time. Time to get back to living. Time to leave the cocoon which had long ago grown too tight. Time to emerge. And what better time than springtime? Everything is emerging from its winter nap and now we are emerging too.
We went out for pizza today and it felt both strange and familiar. Like we hadn’t been there in decades and like we had been there just yesterday. Everything about the restaurant and the experience was the same as so many pre-pandemic outings, yet we were very different people.
So much has happened over the last two years. Not just the pandemic, but so many other things. It makes us appreciative of simply going for pizza. For going to an arcade. For the fact that unlike over a million Americans, we made it through. That unlike over a million Americans, we can choose what’s next in this one life we are given.
The emerging feels just a little bit uncomfortable, but not near as uncomfortable as the cocoon. It feels like our wings are still slightly damp. While we’re happy to have more room, maybe it will take a little more time to really fly.