Coronavirus Chronicles: 03/17

It was yesterday afternoon the sixteenth of March that, as far as my individual life is concerned, Coronavirus ‘broke out’: escaped from its innocuous, abstract place in idle talk and news reports to intrude, abruptly and unwelcomed, into my daily existence.

The exact moment arrived at work, more specifically at the end of a conference room table, where it was announced that, in an effort to contain the virus which was spreading so rapidly across the state, our noble optometry clinic would be shutting down indefinitely.

This wasn’t the first tangible effect the virus had on my life. Already, my visits to patients as a hospice care volunteer had been suspended, and my tutoring lessons had been moved to Skype. A concert that my choir group was going to be performing at had also been cancelled.

But this — the loss of my full-time job —was a disruption that signaled a radical change in my life. Suddenly, I was faced with the looming prospect of an unpayable rent. For the first time in my relatively privileged life, I felt like I had to work just to maintain my livelihood.

This would be a difficult situation, but not an insurmountable one. Part of my income was already coming from tutoring, and I could easily pick up more hours; as for the rest, it could be supplemented by freelance copywriting work. With enough ingenuity, the money coming in from these two jobs could keep me going.

And maybe there was a silver lining to the whole thing: necessity is the mother of invention, and there’s no necessity like needing money for groceries. I was reminded of a Bryson Tiller lyric: Now the man is blessing me / First the man was testing me / I went through the storm not knowing whether it’s green on the other side or not / That shit would bring out the best in me. Maybe, through this situation, some part of ‘the best of me’ would come out.

But all this was under an important condition, one that was by no means guaranteed: that I would be able to adhere to a strict routine and apply myself to it fully, and by so doing, transmute a surplus of free time, that precious but insidious thing, into hours spent productively.

In other words, the challenge that faced me was one of structure-building and self-mastery. I would have to abstain from my tendency for idleness, a tendency which had previously been kept in check by my job, and supplement it with an intrinsic drive to get work done.

And that was, as far as my practical concerns went, the most immediate result of Coronavirus’s breakout on my life.