What can I write here? An apology to any of my readers that are still out there? Some excuses. Annoying affirmations. I don't know. I guess I will just stick to the facts: I have not posted here in over 3 years. So I will just deal in hard on facts! The fact is that we are now beginning the 4th year in Covid. Certainly things have improved a great deal. We are not only no longer in a lock down. We are no longer wearing masks. And most of us are now not consciously trying to avoid people, or trying to stay six feet away from others when out and about. I just returned from a trip from my home in Wisconsin to visit my younger son's family in San Clemente, CA. Flights are very crowded now, ie full planes on almost every route. Rarely do you see someone wearing a mask in the airport and I saw no one else on my flight wearing a mask of any kind, regular cheap around the ear kinds, or N 95 masks. There just are none. I did wear a mask on the way out because I didn't want to get there for my several day visit and then start to get sick. The one time that I got Covid in August of 2022, I came down with symptoms 24 hours after the known exposure so I knew it could happen rapidly. And I wore the mask on the return trip from CA just because it wasn't a significant discomfort on the way out so why change on the way back. And getting Covid is still an annoying discomfort. You need to isolate still. I as a physician do not feel I can go out to public places and be close to others unless I have turned from positive on the home testing devices to negative. The one time I got Covid, I just had maybe 4 days of significant symptoms but it took 11 days for me to turn negative. That is very annoying because I just felt I had to stay home.
Covid is still around. Every few days one hears of someone we know that has been ill. Yet when I ask my surgeon son about the situation in the hospital, he answers that it is normal. Everything is running as smoothly as before Covid, though there are still some precautions being taken. Elective surgery is still precluded in the presence of Covid positivity in the patient. And there are still some cases of severe SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in the ICU, but mostly in patients with other compromising illnesses. Visitors to outpatient care now often see a posted notice that wearing a mask is optional and there is no longer a greeter asking every person entering the clinic a group of questions about recent possible symptoms of any Covid like illness. Our society as a whole still shows signs of what we have gone through. Many businesses and restaurants in particular have closed. People now have discovered multiple different ways to go shopping, to do business online, even to seek medical consultation online, and certainly there is evidence that the long shutdown of schools have left our young people at least a year behind in their schooling if not more. We still do not know the social scars that the absence from school has caused. Our society seems still somehow anxious, fearful, angry, lacking civility, and common decency, and crime rates have skyrocketed. There is dramatic inflation that is slowing the economy. In person retail has been irreparably damaged in many ways. Small colleges are closing because of multiple effects: smaller enrollment, inflation of costs, and who knows what else. There have been a tiny number of bank closings, but these have been explained away as caused by poor management, and the government has extended FDIC coverage to all patrons of those couple banks. Our country is engaged in a proxy war in Ukraine and our enemies around the world seem emboldened. The causes of all of these crises and others are multifactorial and can not be entirely blamed on Covid though it no doubt has had some effect everywhere.
How do we individually and societally deal with all of these changes and our current collective malaise? There is no easy answer. But I think that we need to return to some of our former values. Church attendance is reduced. Small kindnesses and politeness, and deeper compassion seem hard to practice. There are occurrances of road rage, of airline passengers just totally losing control of their emotions and striking out at others, of course, the crime waves in cities, and other examples demonstrate our collective anxiety and even despair. So we need to return to what could be called "Church" practices, no matter what the exact spiritual tradition or belief system. Almost all world religions have practices and rituals that reach beyond the individual and express caring, compassion and concern for others. We need to start practicing those traditions again. After 50 years of my life, while educating myself, raising a family, maintaining a household while working fulltime as a physician, I had ceased going to church. I always had an active spiritual practice but it was irregular and not based in collective society. I meditated, attending a spiritual seeking group weekly, and read a lot. But I was not a participating member of a large traditionally practicing religion. Within the last year I have returned to a church similar to the one in which I grew up...a Protestant sect, called Congregationalists, which is mostly baed on Calvinistic thought, but has not succumbed to mergers with other Protestant denominations. I have found a very accepting and welcoming community in that church and have become significantly more involved in the activities there. I think that has helped me with some of my pessimism about the current state of affairs around the world. It is good to have at least weekly attempts to find goodness in people and to find hope that the current cycle is a passing phase of humanity's existance and to return to acts of kindness and good deeds for our fellows that hopefully will turn us all around. For me at least, this has helped.
I don't have any other magic ideas. I think everyone has to find their own best pathway but I think that many of the traditional ones used in the past would work for each of us. We must remember that the causes of our current societal malaise is multifactorial and very complex. No single solution will work to solve the ills but I think that small steps that are familiar to each of us individually, especially those with which we grew up, will help us cross the bridge to some sort of world change that is better. We must hope and build faith that this will happen. I myself plan to continue to update this old fashioned blog with some new posts that hopefully will be worth reading. A lot has changed in my life in the past 3 years and maybe just reading about some of my experiences and how I handled them will be of some help to my readers. I hope so.
