Editorial note: You can now read my Weird Covid essay in Slate! Thank you to Shannon Palus for helping me polish it up for a wider audience.
If you’ve been reading this newsletter for a while, you might remember me asking, two months into a still indefinite quarantine, “what do I need to do to live this way forever?” For me, the answer was dialing way back on work and its place in my life while simultaneously getting serious about protecting my writing time and cultivating my creative ambition. Two years, a Weird Covid case, a book deal, and several lifetimes’ supply of geopolitical bullshit later, I’m still following the outline I established then. Learning how to consistently show up for a schedule and ruthlessly stick to my priorities instead of caving to everyone else’s has been so important. But even more transformative, I think, has been internalizing a sense of the long haul.
We usually hear that the key to changing habits is incremental, daily tweaks. Keep it under two minutes, but do it every day. Learn to show up even when you don’t feel like it. Set a goal that will keep you motivated but won’t overwhelm you before you even begin. Don’t think about who you will become after the habit sticks, just focus on taking one step forward as the person you are now. These are all good pieces of advice, especially the ones that guide you to keep changes aggressively small and doable. I used a lot of them as I reshaped my days in quarantine and out of it. But I want to make a case for thinking less about today and more about eternity.
Take yoga, which I’ve been practicing for 17 years. For 15 of those years, I considered it, like all exercise, to be essentially punishment for having a body. I genuinely liked doing yoga, but I couldn’t conceive of actually wanting to do it, if that makes sense. In the absence of internal motivation, I fell back on habit and obligation. I had to do yoga. I crammed classes into my day wherever they would fit. If I didn’t feel up to going, I felt like a failure. If I got sick, or went on vacation, or took a long break for any reason, I honestly believed I might never practice again. Every day I did or didn’t do yoga became a referendum on me as a person.
Then quarantine came, and yoga became a key element of the “living like this forever” strategy. There were no classes to attend, no teachers who could see me, no schedule to follow. With the din of the outside world turned way down, I could hear my body telling me what it needed, and I started to be able to trust it. I no longer had to do yoga, or anything else, but for the first time, I wanted to. Whether or not I would do yoga on any given day stopped being a relevant question, much less a source of anxiety. I would always do yoga. So it no longer mattered that on some days, I didn’t.
I went through a similar process with writing, and cooking, and cleaning, and so many other big and small things. Rather than forcing myself to write and seeing each day I didn’t as a dangerous break in the chain that threatened my career and sense of self, I started trusting that I would write. I would write every day. I would write forever. That became the baseline, the default. And so the breaks, long and short, planned and unplanned, became part of sustaining that forever, instead of signs that I had failed and had to start all over again. Rest became part of the work, instead of a threat to it.
For me, feeling like I’ve already failed is the surest path to procrastination, doom-scrolling, and self-destructive thought loops. The way out of that isn’t white-knuckling it to meet superhuman expectations for as long as possible, until I inevitably collapse and struggle to get back up. The way out is to take the possibility of failure off the table. To lie down well before I collapse, and to experience what it’s like to genuinely want to return. To operate from a place of trust instead of fear. To know that today is just one small piece of forever, and the right thing to do is whatever I need to keep myself going until I get there—or rather, until I never get there, which is exactly the same thing.