September 14, 2020: Discernment Practice

In normal times, I would wake up if I smelled smoke. I'm a light sleeper and a good smoke-detector. In the past few days I've trained myself, or life has trained me, to carry on while smelling smoke all day. In normal times, thick yellow skies would be a sign that something was very wrong. Now I'm evaluating shades of yellow, degrees of thickness. We live in smoke now. Forecasters are saying things will change by Thursday or Friday. Knock wood.

The rose bush is right outside the window..It's a "nuclear winter" lighting design out there.

(Heck, in normal times, I'd wake up if I heard helicopters or people on bullhorns. I would have gone stark raving if I hadn't somehow turned down that subconscious monitoring system.)

We are told to stop checking the Air Quality Index maps all day, so that we don't crowd the bandwidth. But I do let myself check when I first get online. Yesterday, a friend and I were marveling at how palpable the levels are, how even though we are beyond "unhealthy," (AQI 100-199), beyond "very unhealthy"(200-299),  and out into "hazardous" air, where the scale extends as far as the eye cannot see (300 - infinity, and we've been over 500, and had communities over 600 this week), we can still tell "It's a little better" or "It's a little worse." (A friend wrote yesterday that he longed for unhealthy air.)

This morning I wondered if I'd developed the hitherto unimagined skill of guessing what the number was, the way some people can say "It's 92 degrees right now, not 91." I guessed the AQI number before I left my bedroom, our "clean room," which was foolish, and I was way wrong - I guessed 399, but it's 441. 

Before the fires became top of mind, someone wrote "Stop re-watching videos of Black people being killed. You are just desensitizing yourself." 

I wasn't watching those videos, actually can't watch them, but I was struck by an analogy - Oh my god, I know why I almost didn't see two pedestrians while I was driving this week! I had hung my mask on my rearview mirror, where it swayed a bit. I had then trained myself to ignore movement right in front of me. The mask came down. Haven't failed to see a pedestrian since. (It shouldn't be a victory, spotting pedestrians, but it's definitely catastrophic if I fail to spot them.) Note to fuzzy dice and air freshener afficianados - put them out of sight!

We desensitize to keep going. We desensitize so that hundreds of thousands of deaths, and millions of cases of disease, and armies of people out of work don't swamp us in despair. We start saying, "That's a little better." We start measuring nuance - not just fewer people dead, but fewer people hospitalized, fewer people on ventilators. Not something we would have recognized as a victory before things got so bad. But BETTER! We start testing our skill at predicting: will we hit 200,000 this week or next, or Can We Make It to October, please? That would be better! 

It's all in what you are comparing. A week ago, David Leonhardt wrote about what things would look like if the US had done an average job of dealing with the pandemic, and I haven't been able to get it out of my head: "

"Here’s a jarring thought experiment: If the United States had done merely an average job of fighting the coronavirus — if the U.S. accounted for the same share of virus deaths as it did global population — how many fewer Americans would have died?

The answer: about 145,000."

I took one of my sporadic online yoga classes last night, from my favorite teacher. She said she was trying to stay "in the middle" these days - not emotionally overcharged with fear and grief, and not totally shut down, walled off from all stimulus. She was trying to be aware but functional. I liked the idea.

So here's a count: Two days ago, I mostly kept the shades drawn so that the color of the sky couldn't freak me out, but when I did look out, I saw one solitary bird. Yesterday, more outside glimpses, zero birds. This morning, shades up, three birds. No, wait, five! So far.