Losing that 'boundless sense of optimism'

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels

Damir Marusic reflects on the emotional damage done by two years of pandemic:

Maybe as the variants get less deadly and we get better at managing sporadic outbreaks of novel mutations, something approaching the previous normalcy will re-emerge. But that’s not really what we mean when we say “getting back to normal.” We want to have our innocence restored, to once again believe in a kind of permanence to our lives. I think that’s gone for good, though. That longed-for permanence is similar to the sense of ourselves we have before we experience the death of a friend. We implicitly believed we were somehow indestructible. Not immortal, but that the same rules didn’t exactly apply to us. A friend’s death shows us that in fact they do. It’s the same with COVID.

It’s a lesson we can, with time, choose not to dwell on but can never unlearn. It’s a part of growing wiser. Eventually we move on, having internalized these hard lessons. Eventually, we straighten up out of our crouch and re-engage with the world. We may memory-hole much of the emptiness that characterized the last two years of our lives, but we won’t regain that sense of boundless optimism born of a belief in stability that we had before.

Emphasis added. The bolded lines caught me up short because they described precisely the same sense I had about 10 years ago, after I'd lost my job and then had a close brush with death all in the span of a year. When I came out the other side -- to the extent that I did -- the thing I mourned most, aside from my lost health, was the death of that "boundless optimism." Somewhere in the back of my head, I think I'd believed that things would always work out somehow, because they always had. (Believe me, I know what a privilege -- perhaps callow -- it was to have ever possessed such a belief.) After my year-plus of calamity, I no longer felt that to be true: Sometimes things don't work out. Sometimes the losses are permanent. 

There's been a lot of talk the last few years about the trauma we're all experiencing. But Marusic's reflections prompt another possibility: Quite inadvertently, we've all been given what amounts to a midlife crisis at the exact same time -- come face-to-face with our mortality, a lesson that we can't ever quite unforget. We're more aware of our boundaries, our limits, a sense that time is running out because it always is. It's natural that eventually, for most of us, "boundless optimism" fades with age. That's life, and life experience. But it's a tragedy for so many of us to have experienced as younger people, because so much of what is created and made by human beings comes from the ferment of energy and joy that isn't yet haunted by death. I wonder what we're losing, that we've lost, that we can't see because it was never made.