Corner of Bourbon & Division

 It's our annual retreat at my Quaker Meeting. This year's theme is Reboot. Reset. Restore, because of how *gestures widely* 2020 was. 

I am having to do a lot of soul-searching about this, because a lot of the queries revolve around what the past year meant for me, what my most significant experience was, what I think I learned, all of that stuff, and it is making me really fucking uncomfortable.

For one thing, I am not sure I learned anything particularly profound, not in the way they mean. I learned a lot about viruses and how pandemics work, and I learned a lot about government response to crisis, and I learned a lot more about systemic racism and injustice, and I learned way more than I ever wanted to learn about the American electoral and judicial systems.

But the idea that I was supposed to derive some sort of spiritual lesson from it all makes me feel deeply uncomfortable, in a similar but not identical way to the idea that was circulating during the first round of lock-downs that we should all be taking the time to learn a new skill or start a side hustle or start a new exercise regimen.

Millions of people are dead, and many more millions are sick, and millions of people have had their lives irrevocably changed, mostly for the worse. It feels like the height of hubris to imagine that I am supposed to find meaning, or spiritual enlightenment, or anything like that, from my position of complete privilege. I have heard people say that they're grateful for the pandemic because it forced them to slow down, or to appreciate life, or to rearrange their priorities, and while I can't fault them for it exactly, because I do understand that our society is built in a way to prevent us from having any time or energy or space to reflect and so this forced pause gave them exactly that, at the same time I find it all horrifying. What reasonable person would be grateful for death on this scale?

Anyway, I am not sure if my feeling of discomfort is truly a result of this, or the result of a more self-centered feeling of having failed the spiritual enlightenment test of the covid pandemic. *insert eye rolling here* Intellectually I understand that this is not something that was required of me, but so many people are asking that it certainly feels that way, like I should have had a bunch of breakthroughs and understand myself and/or the universe better now, or arrived at some sort of grand cosmic truth.

The reality is that nothing of the sort happened: I continued on, wore a mask, washed my hands more, and tried to follow community health guidelines. I kept going to work, which makes me one of the luckiest people in this pandemic, and limited my interactions with people in order to minimize community spread. I failed at cleaning my house all year, and struggled with my ADHD, and had a shitty time at work for a while, and then I had a less shitty time at work, and then I got an opportunity that made my job enjoyable again. For all intents and purposes, my tiny bubble of existence was not affected by the pandemic except in a larger sense, because the pandemic is all around me and I am trying to do my small part to keep my community safe. I am incredibly privileged, and the idea of having gained something "extra" because the pandemic turned the world upside down feels like I'd be ascending to soaring new heights of privilege.

The topic has come up lately about taking the path of least resistance. This is what I've called it in my head, anyway. Someone mentioned spending the whole day just following people where they went (walking one friend to work led to meeting another friend, which led to meeting a third friend, etc.), and how it allowed her to reconnect with six or seven people she hadn't seen in a long time in a way that she felt was meaningful.

I wonder what it is about hardship that makes us feel virtuous. Somehow, it seems, the harder life is, the better we feel about it, as though somehow suffering makes it not only worthwhile, but right. I have observed people have (perhaps unconconscious) hardship contests, as though being worse off than one's neighbour makes one worthy of the admiration of others, and automatically makes one a better person.

I wonder, though, if the opposite might not be true.

I don't mean to say that being slothful or just "letting life happen" is the right way. That's not what I mean by the "path of least resistance." I don't mean that we should sit back and abdicate responsibility, and in that I suppose the example I used in my first sentence is misleading.

I simply wonder if doing the right thing is really as hard as we make it out to be. I wonder if, were we to make the choice to always do right (by our own definition of what that is, I guess), we would find that it's always onerous, and that hardship and deprivation is always the result. That, by doing the right thing, we are necessarily making ourselves suffer, and that the only consolation we can derive from the suffering is that we're doing it because it's right. It would be interesting to see if, after a certain time (weeks or months or years, I'm not sure) of doing the right thing simply because it's the right thing to do, we might not find that it was a lot easier than we originally anticipated, and that in the end it has made our lives simpler and easier and more straightforward. That in time, we will find that we are, in fact, happy with how things have turned out.

In the same way that it's easier to tell the truth than to lie, because one doesn't have to keep track of the truth the same way one has to keep track of all the lies that follow the original lie, I wonder if it isn't easier to live a good life on the whole, and that most of the perceived hardship of living a simple, healthy life isn't just that: a perception and not reality.

If I find out the answer to that, I'll let you know. :)