This is Something I Am Forever Grateful For

I would never say I am glad it happened.

I don’t want to dismiss the tragedy and the disruption and the loss.

But as I think about what happened five years ago, as I think about my life shutting down for the pandemic in March and April of 2020, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude. I see how it changed me. I see what it taught me. I see the trajectory it put me on.

I’m not talking here about the resurgence of Stoicism that came from these last few troubled years, although that too has been fascinating, exhilarating and obviously good for ‘business’ as an author. I am mostly just talking about how deeply those strange, quiet months—when I was forced to slow down and stay put—recalibrated what I value, what I prioritize, what I want my life to look like.

In March of 2020, as social distancing and lockdowns started, my wife and two young sons settled into our ranch on the outskirts of Austin. We’d lived there for five years, but we were able to live there in a way we’d never lived there before. No more commutes. No more daily trips to the store. No more weekly trips to the airport. No more waking up in hotel rooms. No more time apart.

We would spend literally hundreds and hundreds of days together…in a row. In a way that I don’t think I had ever spent in one place or with anyone in all my life (my parents having been rather busy people themselves). And never before so free from the mental load—the relentless cycle of logistics, scheduling, planning, packing, and worrying about where I needed to be next—that had always kept some part of me from being fully present.

There is no such thing as parental leave in my line of work. And, like a lot of driven people who work for themselves, I’m not sure if I could have taken time off, that I would have let myself. Instead, I’ve worked constantly for much of my career and much of my young children’s lives, accepting and chasing opportunities—even though that meant many nights in hotel rooms and on airport benches. This, in addition to those ordinary work-from-home days that all writers know, where you are technically home but are, in fact, very far away.

Suddenly, every single day, rain or shine, I was able to take my boys for a long walk in the morning. Most days, we also did their nap in the running stroller or a bike trailer. In the evening, we walked again. We got in the pool together almost every day. We read books. We ate every meal together. I never missed a bathtime or a bedtime.

How many miles did we walk on our dirt roads? How much time did we spend in the woods? How many sunrises and sunsets? How many blackberries did we pick? How many fish did we catch?

Again, I understand that this was privileged—many people had it quite badly, and I’m not just referring to the immuno-compromised. My sister spent the pandemic in a small apartment in Brooklyn. My grandmother spent it in a nursing home. We had friends who were doctors and paramedics, soldiers who were deployed. Plenty of other people still had to work in warehouses, in places and conditions they should have had to…while others lost their livelihood entirely.

So I get that it was privileged. That’s my whole point, I am saying I was incredibly lucky.

I was lucky that I got to see my own home in a new way. One thing that struck us was how beautiful that first spring was—and how new it was. Like, we’d never once, in five years, spent enough days in a row at home that we could actually track spring happening, watching the bare trees go from buds to leaves to a cool, lush forest. We’d missed blackberry season most years. We’d get home after golden hour most days. But now we noticed everything—the small, daily transformations, the subtle shifts of light through the windows, the sounds of birds we’d previously been too busy to even see.

In Chloe Dalton’s lovely new book ​Raising Hare​, Dalton—an ambitious and connected political advisor—finds herself in an old house in the English countryside. On a walk one day she comes across a leveret (a baby wild hare) and nurses it back to life. What ensues is a surreal and moving friendship, as the hare becomes a free-range companion, hopping around the house, snoozing quietly by Dalton’s side as she wrote, running in from the fields when called, drumming softly on her duvet to get her attention, even giving birth and raising babies inside Dalton’s home.

These were not particularly well-known or well-understood animals, in fact, they’re largely ignored. So she had to read not just research papers, but poetry and ancient authors just to find out what they’re supposed to eat. Spending hundreds of lonely, quiet hours with the leveret–which she never named–she learned to understand its habits and needs, seeing the world from its umwelt (to use one of my favorite words) in addition to her own. And she came to see the home and countryside that she lived in differently, too.

“I felt a new spirit of attentiveness to nature,” she writes, “no less wonderful for being entirely unoriginal, for as old as it is as a human experience, it was new to me. For many years, the seasons had largely passed by, my perceptions of the steady cycle of nature disrupted by travel and urban life. I had observed nature in broad brushstrokes, in primary colors, at a surface level. I had been most interested in whether it was dry enough to walk, or warm enough to eat outside with friends. I could identify only a handful of birds and trees by name. I hadn’t observed the buds unfurling, the seasonal passage of birds, the unshakeable rituals and rhythms of life in a single field or wood. I now marveled at the purple tinge on the black feathers of a house martin—the smallest creature I had ever seen—which flew into the house one morning…observing the gleam of the sun on the mirror finish of its plumage, before releasing it into the air.”

It’s funny. I spent 2018 and 2019 working on my book ​Stillness is the Key​. One of the main characters of the book is Churchill, whose own relationship with time and the natural world was changed by his love of painting, which he discovered in the midst of a nervous breakdown after WWI. He was introduced to it by his sister-in-law, who, sensing that Churchill was a steaming kettle of stress, handed him a small kit of paints and brushes her young children liked to play with. In a little book titled ​Painting as a Pastime​, Churchill spoke eloquently of the way painting, like all good hobbies, taught the practitioner to be present. “This heightened sense of observation of Nature,” he wrote, “is one of the chief delights that have come to me through trying to paint.” He had lived for forty years on planet Earth consumed by his work and his ambition, but through painting, his perspective and perception grew much sharper. Forced to slow down to set up his easel, to mix his paints, to wait for them to dry, he saw things he would have previously blown right past.

I was just finishing a very busy book tour for ​Stillness​ when the pandemic hit (I actually crossed through the Venice airport in late January on the day when those two Chinese tourists arrived from Wuhan—later identified as among the earliest COVID cases). I thought I knew what stillness was, but the world was about to teach me about real stillness.

For many of us, the pandemic brought everything to ​a screeching, unprecedented stop. I​t stripped everything down, broke it all apart and made so much of our normal lives–work and personal–unsafe, if not impossible. I wasn’t having to get to this plane. I wasn’t having to battle traffic to get somewhere on time. I wasn’t having to prepare for this talk or that one. There were no meetings, no dinners out, no get-togethers, no pressing deadlines.

For all it took from us, it gave us “the privilege of an experience out of the ordinary,” ​as Dalton beautifully put it​.

And yet, what did most of us do with this experience? We complained about it. We resented it. We focused on what was missing. We agitated for things to ‘go back to normal.’ As if the way things were before was how they were supposed to be!

Because of some health issues in our household, because we had the physical space, since I had some financial comfort, and because my in-person work was certainly not essential–I did not want to be responsible for getting people together and getting them sick–we continued our social distancing in a more sustainable way longer than most. I turned down work travel. I declined most social obligations. We let our employees keep working remotely.

This was one of the best decisions I ever made. I really grew as a parent–as an equal parent. I got in a lot of reading and writing and running. And as I said, I grew to really love where we live.

As Dalton writes in her book, she had the same experience.

Me?

I’m grateful for something like 500 consecutive bedtimes with my boys.

I’m grateful for ​the road trips we took​. I’m grateful for the projects we worked on together as a family (​designing the bookstore​, ​writing The Boy Who Would Be King​ and​ The Girl Who Would Be Free​). I’m grateful for the things it forced me to notice and work on in my marriage.

I’m grateful that it forced me to confront the reality that there are many things I don’t have to do. If you’d asked me in January 2020 if I could survive—professionally and personally—with no travel, no events, no dinners out, no get-togethers, I’d have said absolutely not. As it turned out, it was ​not only rewarding but immensely productive in every sense​. Why? Because clearly, those things I thought I had to do, I didn’t actually have to do. As it turns out, I’m better and happier when I don’t.

I’m grateful for what it taught me about human nature, about history, about adversity, about mortality, about our obligations to each other. I’m grateful that it didn’t radicalize me or turn me into an unfeeling, cruel person (what Marcus Aurelius would refer to during the Antonine Plague as the real pestilence). I’m grateful that it showed me what I needed to be most grateful for–my health, my family, the present moment. I’m grateful that it taught me how easy it can be to take so many things about our lives for granted that other people do not share and would count themselves incredibly lucky to have.

I’m grateful for what was, I think you can say, the most radical lifestyle experiment in human history. In a note to myself in the early days of the pandemic, I wrote, “2020 is a test: will it make you a better person or a worse person?”

That was the test that I reminded myself of over and over again: will this make you a better person or a worse person?

In the process, the difficult, painful pandemic became what POW survivor, ​Admiral James Stockdale, would describe​ as a “defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.”