Safe In The Shallow
Every summer in the 90's, my mother would walk my sister and me down to the nearest body of water in our lake-focused town (conveniently called Waterford.) Each warm afternoon that my mother was not at work, we spent hours playing in the shallow areas. My mother was strict about not allowing us to swim outside of the bouy parameter or in water that went past our armpits when our feet touched, whichever came first. Because I was a cautious child that spent more time observing and calculating risks than taking them, I also created a rule for myself: if I couldn’t see the bottom of the lake, I wouldn’t dare to swim over it because only evil knew what lurked in the shadows of the lake that could swallow me whole or pull me to the depths of my death (clearly I was also had quite the imagination.) If I could not see it, I could not accurately assess the risk. Knowing how to swim wasn’t the issue; it was not knowing what could touch me that constricted my chest.
But one day, that changed.
The beach that we frequented also included a boat launch. In the water, at the end of the concrete slabs that was used to guide the trailers into the lake lay a giant hole created by the washout from the propellers of each boat as the engines were started. My brother, the explorer, decided it would be neat to dive into this cavity fully equipped with goggles, expanded lungs and a nagging curiosity.
I thought he was crazy but then I watched as he would dive in and swim up over and over again, continuing to return to the surface unscathed. So despite my fear of this murky, dark unknown abyss, I dove in.
Reaching the bottom came surprisingly quick. The pit that I imagined to reach to the core of the earth was merely a couple feet deeper than the floor of the lake that I stood on surrounding it. In fact, nothing scary was to be found in shallow depths of the hollow: just a pile of dead leaves, a few lost items, old glass bottles and many beautiful marbles that the neighbor we called the “beach troll” would fling at the geese who occupied the beach over the years.
What once felt like a terrifying crater to the unkown was suddenly just a small rut full of garbage, treasure and another possibility to explore.
I found myself wondering this morning what health experts had predicted for our coronavirus cases to reach by this time. It is now June 30th, 2020 and it has been just over four months that Governor Whitmer announced Michigan’s “Stay Home, Stay Safe” order, shutting down the state in an effort to contain the spread of the virus.
On March 11th, a wave of anxiety swept over me and I couldn’t quite pinpoint it but I took to my journal and wrote: “A certain feeling of dread filling me. It’s not enough to remain optimistic; ignorance is only bliss until you’ve become infected. Until you’ve become disenfranchised. Until you’re not just down on your luck but completely overwhelmed in challenges…I have a feeling it’s just the tip of the iceberg — the worst may be yet to come. I’ll try not to let the pessimism get the better of me but I’m much more apt to be prepared than to be surprised, though I know it is inevitable.”
Just 13 days later on March 24th, in that same journal, I penned the words “It’s gotten worse.”
Using coronavirus stats from The New York Times, I recorded:
Cases / World: 395,439
Deaths / World: 17,226
Cases / US: 46,168
Deaths / US: 582
Today’s stats via TNYT, just four months later:
Cases / World: 10.3 million+
Deaths / World: 505, 734
Cases / US: 2.6 million+
Deaths / US: 126,121
Yesterday CNBC published a story that highlighted what the CDC is now saying: “The coronavirus is spreading too rapidly and too broadly for the U.S. to bring it under control.”
So here we are — nowhere close to a vaccine (that the public knows of.) Simultaneously, we face a tremendous divide in the country about what has happened, what is happening and how to address the future in terms of law enforcement, racial discrimination and disparities and our government. We have people fighting for the rights of black lives, brown lives and whatever the hell “blue lives” are. We have people who are committed to finding common ground, creating peace, change and equality. We have people who are committed to violence, reciprocity, control and hell bent on not wearing a mask to protect others. We have those who worship gods, politicians who are barely functioning adults and…firearms?
Then we have those who are silent. Some are observers, some are frozen in fear. Some are oppressed into silence and there are those who are blinded by willful ignorance. We have deniers of deadly disease — be it a novel virus, inherent bias, mental health struggles, self-deception and greed.
So many have claimed to be sympathetic or quick to call out flaws in “both sides” but therein lies the problem: somehow, still, we can only imagine two.
Our problems are not two-dimensional. To reduce the complexity of human intellect, emotional capacity, and various perceptions is minimizing to the depth of our experiences and the struggles that we face as a collective.
To minimize people into two groups is to ignore the beautiful, the ugly, the calm, the angry, the empathetic, the disastrous and the various angles of who we are. It reduces and shrinks our views into a narrow scope of possibilities of who we can become.
Until we start acknowledging the world outside of our small bubbles and start taking notice of the intricacies that make up the lives outside of what we are familiar with, we can’t fully address the problems and move forward in a healthy and constructive way.
Saying there are two sides to every story is akin to calling the earth flat: like there is a beginning and an end; a upside and a downside.
But there is so much more.
There isn’t simply two sides to every story. There is not even several. There is an evolution to each tale and a thousand facets that sparkle and dim depending on who is relaying the message under what lighting, in what context and in what mood.
If we continue to discuss problems while referring only to “both sides,” we are discounting all those interesting facets of the equation and ignoring much wider breadth of possibilities.
In times of great uncertainty and fear, it’s imperative that we strive to keep an open mind. To remind ourselves that what we see on the surface is often just a reflection of us and how we view the world. But beneath the surface, in the dark shadows of the murky water is an entire world that we may not know or understand. An abyss with depths that scare the hell out of us but if we just decide to armor up and explore it, we may see so many more possibilities in the way that we approach our issues. But until we can move past the safety of the shallow end and understand that our reflection in the water’s surface is not the beginning, the end and everything in between, we’re stuck wading in the same murkiness that we have polluted ourselves.
