It is one of the dwindling days of May, and I feel little tugs of emotion: missing out on the puppyhood of a new grand dog, celebrating a legal case victory without face to face office camaraderie, approaching a significant birthday without the family festivity I had envisioned. Diminished social engagement mandated by the pandemic seems to have impacted me in other ways, as well; the smallest life changes seem substantial, disproportionally blown up within the backdrop of stifling self-isolation.
I pick up Boomer, the Boundless Bundle of Canine Exuberance, from his last day of doggy daycare, and I feel familiar, but unexpected, pricks of sentiment beneath my eyelids. Boomer’s daytime boarding and his playgroup were a necessity during our home remodel in 2019 and a luxury for him, and us, in 2020. But now the cost seems excessive, as it parallels the food budget for me and my husband. And yet, I already miss the familiar exclamatory warmth of the staff at his drop off and his exhilaration at my arrival in the evening.
If sentiment drives my emotions these days, it is my lifelong discontent with change that fuels it. Every transformative juncture burns into my memory leaving an emotional blemish, if not an outright scar. I remember pivotal lifetime moments with my children, and I recall with photographic perfection, the look in their eyes when I dropped them off at preschool, at sleepovers, at middle school and distant colleges, and at new apartments when they launched, post-graduation. I am forced to embrace the knowledge that at this stage of my life, I need my children more than they need me.
My adult choices, even those marked with joy and excitement, similarly carry a bittersweet swell of poignancy: leaving my office at a large Seattle law firm for the last time, founding my own law firm, trundling boxes of files to a newly purchased commercial building, closing and locking the final door of a home I loved, and investigating encore careers of writing and coaching.
My friends and confidants are similarly exploring their lives in the quietude of this current environment. They are gratefully engaging with their soon-to-be-launched young adults whose ascension is temporarily delayed. Some are reflecting, or planning, the end of careers or revisioning their future work lives, permanently altered by a revised technological and biological landscape. Others are selling family residences or vacation homes, sorting through memories disguised as personal belongings. We are all quietly assessing our lives in a territory dampened with the veneer of uncertainty. We evaluate, in murmurs within the hushed confines of our homes, what we want to do, what we should have done, what we fear we will never be able to do.
Like a phased public reopening, we search our lives ahead for progress, for shifts, and for passages. At first, our steps are timid. We dare ourselves to don masks and warily enter grocery stores for the first time in months. We plan socially distanced gatherings at parks in sparsely attended areas. We envision future travel and compile bucket lists, emboldened by a compelling need to believe that innovation and adaptation will be our salvation.
We begin to extricate ourselves from the unyielding grasp of impediment and interruption. We venture out hesitantly into the brightness of a life we once knew, blinking while adapting to its newness yet recognizing its core familiarity. And as we do so, the ambivalence of change is replaced by the richness of evolution.