A Short Journal Entry on Quarantine, Creativity, and Being Human When the World Seems Inhumane

by Michael LaPenna

Like many of you, I’ve spent the past several contemplating my next move… I’m going through the roller coaster of emotional consequences caused by COVID-19. I spent the first week contemplating my own mortality: if I died, if either or both of my parents died, if my wife died. Couple that with the prospect of dying alone and you get a cocktail for crying myself to sleep and telling myself to seek immediate talk therapy. I took myself up on the offer and therapy put everything in perspective: the relative unlikelihood of death, the realization of what I had instead of what I didn’t. I spent a lot of time thinking about what getting the most out of life means for me while coming face-to-face with this insipid invisible air monster that can kill me, make me sick, or give me no symptoms all that, as of this writing, has no cure and no universally defined treatment. I thought about unfinished creative projects that I would be sad about not being able to do or complete before I died—and so, I thought I could do all that during the quarantine, but the natural depression of the news (COVID-19, economic recession, civil unrest, and the coming election here in the US) and the simple lack of the usual events that consume my life on a regular basis. (Even with my wife being an introvert by nature, we do a lot of going out and spending time with others). We couldn’t go to farmers’ markets, to our friends parties, their weddings, their baby showers—nor could we go out to eat to support our favorite local restaurants or find and explore new ones. Still, weirdest of all, with the sports world on hold for an indefinite amount of nebulous time until earlier this summer, the only sports available for moths were South Korean baseball and the Twilight Zone that is professional wrestling with no audience. (For those that don’t know, I grew up loving the mixture of sports, soap opera, circus, and magic show that is professional wrestling. There’s no other genre like it in the world, and like most things, when it’s bad it’s the worst bad movie no Razzie can encapsulate, but when it’s good and when the crowd is invested, it’s like watching your favorite action movie with a live audience of 20,000 people witnessing live theater of the absurd joys and tragedies of life—but I digress.

As we look upon or collective human condition in this moment, I cannot help but realize that this experience is forcing us to stop and be still in world usually so comfortable to be busy, hustling, distracted, and disquieted. It is wresting us down to think of what’s important and at best has and likely will necessitate that we innovate new ways of being human beings in our level of patience, kindness, and learning what to when people and and situations aren’t either of those ( in times of tension or protest). For creatives that could mean so many things, but most of all, it might give us more time to think and to be in solitude with what our art is. After all, drawing, painting, writing, or sculpting can be done in solitude and much of it can be done in quarantine. (Most of us are not Shakespeare or Galileo calculating and crafting our respective calculuses or King Lears in the self-reflective solitary confinement of quarantine). We do know; however, that we don’t like to be too stagnant for too long. As the late Bruce Lee might remind us, humans at our creative best like to flow like water down a teaming stream filled with life and vitality. Lee famously implored us to, “Be water, my friend.” I endorse the flow.

For months now around the world, we homebound humans have been being asked to stay in with friends, with family—or by ourselves with suddenly enough time to stop, breathe; read the books we’ve been meaning to read, watch all the movies we’ve been meaning to watch, initiate all the exercise we’ve been meaning to take new levels of fitness, or make all the art we’ve neglected to prioritize as soul food (including my own creative writing).

So as you come out of your funk, your depression, your fears, consider that though the world may be in one of its darkest hours in the past hundred years—being forced apart by quarantine or by unfortunate departure from this planet—the living and moving majority of us have a call to be ourselves in the best ways we know possible and to show the world what is possible through tragedy and tears while on the way to possibility and triumph..