I’ve heard it takes about 30 days to establish a new habit, so I Googled it and the first line that came up said this: “It can take anywhere from 18 to 254 days for a person to form a new habit and an average of 66 days for a new behavior to become automatic.”
Since the shutting down of everything in mid-March of 2020 to now, May 22nd of 2022, it has been almost 800 days. In the past few months, things have been gradually shifting toward normalcy – things like laughing and conversing with friends and neighbors in Island Market; riding the ferry on the upper deck unmasked alongside tourists marveling at the breathless sights; gathering for much-needed celebrations and closures. But think about that for a minute – until these last few months, we had about TWENTY-FOUR months of quiet and human strangeness.
I remember feeling distraught a few months ago when I mentioned to my sister on the phone that I didn’t know if I could mentally handle more social isolation, and her reply was shock. “Are things not back to normal there?” she asked with a tone of alarm. She went on to explain that where she lives, people had been back to normal activities for quite a while. But her normalcy – shopping at the mall, getting together with other families for outdoor barbecues, and so on – wasn’t the same as Orcas normalcy. When rain holds us in for six to eight months a year, we gather at endless indoor festivities. All kinds. With that removed, life just wasn’t right here.
I write today in thankfulness that life has finally opened up here. The clouds have parted and the sun has shone for a few weekends now. I sat down to write a book in October and the same gray, rainy sky hovered above us until just recently. Yesterday felt like the turn toward summer, and my nose is even a little sunburned.
I am blowing a gasket – a sometimes happy, sometimes emotional gasket – at the idea of filling gaps that were steadily growing beyond repair inside me. I’ve felt the roar of an enormous crowd at a concert; I’ve cried in mourning with others at a funeral; I’ve laughed heartily at stupid cliché humor and the sight of Channing Tatum’s stories-high back side while watching The Lost City at an IMAX movie theater; I’ve attended church seated next to people I haven’t seen for two years; I’ve hugged and conversed with locals for way too long through the aisles of Island Market.
How important it feels to walk into town for farmers’ market – to feel the needed sun on my skin, brush past other people’s clothing, absorb smiles on unmasked faces, smell the mixture of perfume and food cooking, enjoy standing in a crowd of other humans, and strike up conversations with people I’ve never met. It’s the basics that mean everything now. I can just stand and watch people for extended periods of time. It fills me in ways I can’t get filled otherwise.
I can feel how neuropathways in my brain have changed in these two-plus years. I can see how they have affected my daily thoughts and habits. I forget that I can initiate hanging out with friends and having people over. I dwell unnaturally on narrow mindsets that have been programmed in my brain due to a lack of daily variety and spontaneity – like little things in our marriage that bug me and stay on my mind for unnaturally long stints until I remember I can go out and be around other people, which will take the laser focus off my husband. Or the gray weather – I can really dwell on the bummer of a rainy day because it has become a trigger that tells me everyone is staying indoors yet again.
I’ve also noticed that our family life feels different, and grappling with that is emotionally significant for me. Two years have passed, and now that we are coming out of the darkness, we are in new life phases. After a life of walking on beautiful beaches together, exploring miraculous creatures around tidepools, hiking up mountain trails, and walking into town to see what happenings just happen, everything has shifted. Our kids have different interests and social needs, especially our teenager. Especially after two years of quiet. The magic of exploring the newness of every little thing in our natural world is not the daily goal anymore. We are in new territory.
I realize new needs I have, too. All the years we lived here before COVID, I didn’t care to venture beyond the island. I was fully invested in wallowing in that nature magic with our children, totally immersed and happy to be unconnected with the rest of society, uninterested in visiting freeways that led to cities, buildings, and busy people. Any time we visited America, it was to gather needed supplies and head back home. I didn’t even know Alderwood Mall existed until two weeks ago, and I can’t believe how many Orcas residents I passed in those stores.
I realize after these two years that I need to get off the island now and then, not just to go to Costco and Fred Meyer and come home. I’m not a shopper; I have buyer’s remorse even when I get needed socks and underwear, or clothes that look nice on me; I’d normally rather run a marathon than go to a mall. But there are new desperate and immediate needs in me after experiencing the kind of Orcas isolation that I didn’t choose. I welcome the spending of money not just for functional, practical purposes (who am I now??); I look forward to the next time I go off-island to take my kids to the trampoline place in Marysville, or to MoPOP (Museum of Popular Culture) and the amazing public park next to it below the Space Needle.
My mental world is expanding exponentially as I envision new ways of experiencing life here with our older children, as I think about our firstborn going to college after one more year of high school, and as I ponder where life may take us as they get older. I no longer get to wake up thinking about visiting little Indian Island at low tide. My mind is adjusting to the rapid expansion of thoughts far beyond this quiet little place.
Time did not stop for us to enjoy infinite youth on sparkling little beaches. It is suddenly moving forward at a pace I can barely keep up with, after two years of being forced to adjust to unnatural stillness.
You can also find this on the May 22nd Sun Days column on theOrcasonian here.
