What I Have Missed the Most

"What is it that you have missed the most in the last several months?” he asked. The questioner knew just what I was bound to answer, because it is the response he has been hearing throughout the neighborhood.
These long months of virtual isolation have been hard on all of us. Our normal patterns have been violated. I now look at my calendar that is usually cluttered with all sorts of deadlines, appointments, errands, social events, concerts, bridge and meetings. That was how my life went day after day until the pandemic shut everything down. Now it is almost blank.

Much about these long months of isolation has suited me and have nourished my inner world. I had usually written in the mornings and painted in the afternoons, and these months I have tried to keep with this schedule. During this half year of solitude I have written more weekly columns than I could publish, have completed over twenty paintings and have enjoyed more reading than I had been able to do for years.

Here, however, is my reply to the questioner’s question about what I have most missed.
“THE COMMUNITY! THE PEOPLE I HAVE GROWN TO CHERISH.THE INTERACTION OVER LUNCH. THE COMRADESHIP OF MY MEN’S GROUP.THE VIGOROUS DISCUSSIONS AT MY MONTHLY BREAKFAST GANG. LECTURES, VESPERS, AUTOBIOGRAPHIES—YES, EVEN COMMITTEE MEETINGS-----AND MORE!

It all has to do with community, with the meaning we find with each other. Wendy will tell you that I am not overly gregarious. I don’t comfortably chat or go far out of my way to greet people. I love my solitude. Much of my world revolves around my internal life. Most of my best conversations are with myself.

BUT ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. While I have cherished the solitude, never confusing it with loneliness, it has become clear that increasing importance revolves around you—my colleagues on the journey we call life. I don’t know who I really am, what my deepest values are, even what I believe, without the interaction called “community.”

Attempts during this hiatus to overcome the imposed barriers have helped a bit. I must admit, however, that I now take ZOOM in smaller and smaller doses. Most of my earlier meetings and encounters seemed to have clear time limits, but get going on ZOOM and nobody knows quite how to close it off, even after everyone has said everything they needed to and then repeated it again. There have been times when I pushed the LEAVING THE MEETING button a half hour before anyone noticed my absence. Slowly returning to my pre-pandemic life won’t be easy. My risk will come when I tell myself that I have grown so accustomed to my isolation that I am now too comfortable. John Donne was right:

No man is an Iland, intire of itselfe; every man
is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine;
if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe
is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as
well as if a Manor of thy friends or of thine
owne were; any mans death diminishes me,
because I am involved in Mankinde;
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.