What I’m not doing is caused by the void that is our current reality. What I’m doing is vague and unstructured. The result is not my expectation, nor is it cause for concern, though I would like to discover what is going on during this time of great uncertainty. There’s no precedent in my life for the witnessing of the entirety of humanity hitting the pause button. I look into the past for clues about the present so the future can be revealed, but that’s a dead end as nothing in the past is relevant to how a modern interconnected global economy and the cultural engine of shared spaces come to a halt.

Life is not like a videotape we would hit pause on and, upon pressing play again, continue where we left off. This paradigm from the time before COVID was an artifact of the industrial age, but we don’t live back there anymore. Our now is not even the now we’ll learn to know as it’s not defined yet.

I find these months rather confusing as there’s no trajectory any of us know of with any certainty. I suppose it’s good that we think we’ll just continue with business as usual as soon as we feel there’s a clear enough break in the viral mayhem, but why would we return to what was when everything leading up to this brought us to our current situation? I wouldn’t necessarily say it’s been a failure of humanity that has us at these crossroads, but it’s certainly not worth returning to our business-as-usual paradigms.

I don’t think I’m the only one bereft of answers and adrift, wondering where we are going. Reports of dream patterns being disturbed were part of the early narrative as we humans stopped much of our routine activity. This was blamed on many things, but I have a hunch it was because, deep and intuitively our species knew that we are going to have to dig within to find answers to the implications of where we are headed. A new map is being drawn, but collectively, we have no real idea what that looks like while we are still recovering from the shock of everyone being thrown out of their complacency.

If I had to guess, I’d ponder that after our species harnessed fire, we needed many centuries, millennia, even to understand just how life for our species had been altered by this skill. As a matter of fact, I might even guess that our frantic behavior before COVID-19 was some kind of primal response to our mastery of electricity and global communication. Today, maybe we are on the precipice of requiring our attention to be drawn in tighter on moving without traveling, living without waste, and organizing in ways that are sustainable to not only our own species but to the other creatures and the planet that we all call home.

I get that this is nothing novel and that we’ve had people for decades calling for us to adopt a more harmonious balance with nature, but we’ve never had an intellectual tsunami strike every one of us in a relative blink of an eye.

Travel is dead, very dead, and while we are hoping for an awakening this summer, there is no guarantee that anything will really draw people back to the sky or open waters. Hotels are planning on opening no later than June 1st and are priced like it’s going to be a normally busy summer season. Even if the rates by mid-summer go down by half there’s still the issue of restaurants, gift stores, and coffee shops that might see visitors reluctant to take a pause anywhere other than their room or out in nature away from others. The point is that we don’t have any idea yet how our behaviors have already changed. This can only be compounded by those who can still afford to travel but might be nervous about job prospects should a second wave of the virus attack us come fall. Will they be part of the second wave of layoffs? Will they recognize early the need to save for that emergency? Maybe they’ll spend part of the summer ensuring their pantry is set up for a long winter when COVID or a new variant comes back with a vengeance.

For two months now, I’ve not been able to bring myself to watch a movie, as everything I could watch features groups of people that look archaic and beyond my comprehension of the current situation. Occasionally, I catch an ad in front of a YouTube clip, and the outdated nature of it shows me, people in settings that no longer exist; it’s as though they are from an antiquated history that some previous generation lived in that is not my time right here right now. I am doing okay with the music I’m choosing to listen to as it’s used once and disposed of, which is made all the easier with how many people are live-streaming performances I’ll never hear a second time.

I had low patience for things nostalgic prior to COVID aside from the relevant practical knowledge passed up through history, but now, most of our former contemporary culture is being stricken from my senses. Maybe a poor analogy exists where I can compare what the music from the Roman Empire might sound like to a kid who appreciates the mumble rap of Lil Xan. No matter as any comparison is mostly useless when what is needed, what is wanted, can only be found in a future that is beyond the horizon and undefined.

Our next journey is to figure out how to cross the unknown divide, how to hurtle ourselves over the chasm that’s been created by an invisible molecule that challenges us to navigate its terrain as opposed to our previous 500 years of conquering the terrestrial territory. It feels ironic that we placed ourselves at the top of all life on Earth, and now we are held hostage by an invisible enemy. We should have heeded the invisible enemy within called consciousness and intelligence, but those were in the way of power and brawn; who needs books when you have guns?

But maybe this enemy is our liberator? The existing powers are trying to show that they believe it has answers because to admit weakness or uncertainty would impact the tools of control they’ve wielded for centuries. This relationship of forced conformity cannot last as they lack a forward vision that is an equal but opposite amount of zeal when compared to their love of money. Opening society because of markets and economies is the natural move that should be made by those who haven’t yet recognized the paradigm has shifted; this is after all that they know.

Then, on the other hand, just as early hominids could have never comprehended that their use of fire would someday be harnessed to aloft a rocket into space to deliver robots to nearby planets, I don’t think we can understand how we are supposed to utilize electronic knowledge systems to propel us to new heights. Other domains of enlightenment are either on our horizon, or we can fall back to existences that are feudal, fraught with uncertainty, and founded on inequality. I hope our path is forward.