My daughter and I recently watched an excellent document called Losing Sight of Shore. It tells the story of a four-woman crew who row across the Pacific from California to Australia unassisted in a 29-foot boat. It was an epic journey, to say the least, with incredible highs and lows both emotionally and physically (they rowed two at a time for two hour shifts so dealt with extreme sleep deprivation on top of everything else).
The low that has stayed with me has been when they near the equator and enter what is known as "The Doldrums." I had heard this term before applied to a general feeling of malaise and lowness in mood, but hadn't fuly realized that it came from a physical place. This place has very low winds, shifting currents, and unusually warm weather. As the crew entered the doldrums they were rowing constantly but often losing overall mileage because of the intense currents. One day they went 9.6 miles in the wrong direction! I can't imagine how difficult it would feel to be working that hard, with all of your might and focus, and still feel that you are losing ground.
Have you wondered what I might be getting at here? Yes, it's (yet another) pandemic metaphor! But really, it did feel resonant to me in this moment. So many of us have been doing all the "right" things, working so hard and with little reward for so long, and yet we find ourselves in a moment where it feels like we are just stagnating, or even moving backwards.
It helped me to feel some spark of recognition in the plight of these rowers, even though my current life is not physically that demanding, the mental calculations of risk and reward have felt overwhelming of late. There is just so much mental energy taken up by my awareness of my own lack of control over the world at large.
So, what is the lesson here? The best one I can take is that sometimes journeys take a lot longer than we initially anticipate, that our paths from start to finish are not always as straightforward as we thought they might be, and most of all that life is always shifting.
Those women DID reach Australia, later than they had planned, and with a different end destination, but with huge celebrations and tears and hugs. I don't imagine the end of the cornoavirus will feel that defnitive, I have heard that part of this particular journey will involve learning to live with this virus, albeit with increased precautions and treatments.
When in the doldrums, we feel that they will never, ever end. And then, they do. There's a metaphor in there and a lesson to be learned for sure. I'm still working on figuring out the lessons I want to learn from this pandemic, but it sometimes feels good to have a name for what I'm feeling. Doldrums is a fun word, too, and brings a smile to my face when I say it. So, there's that--a little smile in the midst of all this grief and angst and endless worry. And the smile feels like relief and hope. Life is shifting beheath our feet, even when we can't feel or see it. So, keep rowing, my friends, keep rowing along the best you can.