Quiet Wars

In my first year of university, I lived in residence in a triple room. And by “triple room” I mean they took a double room and put bunk beds in it. Sneaky.

On move in day, I walked into my room to find a petite, confident, curly-haired, country girl sitting at her desk at the foot of my bed.

“Hi! I’m Leanne.”

I liked her immediately.

We were roommates throughout our entire undergrad and remain dear friends to this day. The kind of friends you don’t talk to as often as you'd like but if they ever needed you, you’d drop everything and show up on their doorstep with either wine or cookies, depending on the situation.

As much as Leanne and I enjoy each other’s company, we’ve always been on completely different roads. She was driven in school, I mostly meandered. She studied to be a physiotherapist, I got a masters in music. She has a full-time job, a house and a family, and runs her own fitness business on the side. I rent an apartment downtown, with no kids, where I try to eke out a living making things, taking on part-time work to stay afloat.

The biggest disparity in our life choices at the moment is that as I write to you, Leanne is on the frontlines of the COVID19 pandemic. She's hustling hard, responsible for things she wouldn't normally be responsible before because it’s an ‘all hands on deck’ situation and it’s her job. Meanwhile I’m at home, sitting tight, eating all the things.

It feels wrong to be here doing this while she’s out there doing that.

There are people in the world who’ve taken jobs that help people in a very tangible way. Your house is burning? We’ll pull you out. Your heart stopped? We’ll give you a new one. Someone’s shooting at you? We’ll stand in front of you and shoot back.

In times like these when we call on these people en masse, I end up staving off waves of guilt that I didn’t go to medical school, or police college, or anything at all practical. I find myself thinking, “Thank god there are people out there who learned how to do that.”

Earlier this week, I tried distracting myself by imagining what kind of pandemic would require me to be in the frontlines. Maybe if there was a disease that only empathy and talking about feelings could cure. Or if we lost the ability to talk and write and our only hope was communicating through images screen printed onto graphic t-shirts. It didn’t exactly assuage my guilt.

Then I listened to Sarah Harmer singing in her kitchen.

I was laying on the couch, watching her live stream on my phone while Jim listened nearby. Halfway through the first song, like an over-filled water balloon I, quite unexpectedly, burst into tears. It was as if someone had suddenly and with no warning opened a release valve. All the confusion and concern and “I don’t know what to do”s came pouring out my eyes and onto Jim, who had kindly assumed the comfort your broken wife position beside me. He kept me company as I cried through her entire set, and for at least another half hour after she’d finished.

I'm pretty sure those tears were what Gordon Neufeld would call tears of futility: tears we cry when we realize something can't be changed. It’s apparently what our nervous system does to bring our emotional system back into balance, and I'll tell you what... it worked.

The next morning, I felt calm. More confident. More connected to who I am. Less frantic. Less anxious. I remembered Harmer’s live stream and I found myself thinking, “Thank god there are people out there who learned how to do that.”

Maybe some of us are on a different kind of frontline.

A quieter, less obvious one. Like mechanics who keep the machines running by periodically turning the release valve. You might not notice it happening, but you’d definitely notice if it didn't.

Except the nurses, the postal workers, the police officers, the grocery store staff - they're not machines. They’re people. They’re tired and scared and frustrated and they’re putting themselves at risk. The battle against fear and uncertainly is just as real as the battle against any virus.

So we make music and art. We reach out with kindness, or humour, or just a simple “hello” because maybe it’s more important than we think. Maybe we need something to help us take a moment to let go, release and re-centre so that we can all move through these strange days with a little more grace than we would otherwise.

Maybe on some fronts, empathy truly is our best defence.

C.