COVID: Still a Pain Even As It Wanes

“Pain [is] the touchstone of all spiritual progress.” --Alcoholics Anonymous

“Tell me if it’s going to hurt.”

That’s my one rule for pain, at least physical pain.  If you are going to give me a shot or stick a needle in my arm to draw blood or do anything to my body that is going to cause pain, just give me a heads up. Okay?

I’ve been thinking about this personal maxim as our nation has started to emerge from COVID lock down and masking up and moved now to a time for COVID slow down and masking off. It’s like the spring of 2021 all over again. I’m as into it as the next mask wearer but then, this happened to me. After one of the very first big social situations I went to without a mask in almost a year, the next day I got a text letting me that a close contact at the meeting was sick with COVID and had tested positive. They hadn’t known they were infectious but that is often how things work when it comes to COVID. 

Everything is okay until it is not okay. You are safe until you are exposed. You are healthy until you become sick. You get sick and maybe it is mild and you recover fast or maybe it is worse and you are laid low, even hospitalized, or maybe you’ll always have long COVID or maybe it will take your life. I try and remind myself of these possibilities on a regular basis, especially now that folks are shedding their masks so fast and so joyfully.

Heck, that’s what I did!   

I want to get rid of the masks forever and everything else that accompanies COVID, all the pains, all the ways it has inflicted very real pain: physical, economic, social, and emotional. COVID is a pain! I wish it would just go away! Shoo! But in reading the news and listening to the scientists and epidemiologists, perusing government websites, heeding the folks who actually know what they are talking about, the message I’m hearing is…we are okay for now but, it could come back. There could be another wave. Or another variant. The need for another shot. But we don’t know if or when.

Pesky virus! Ugh.

But at least I know that the pain might make a return engagement. That the hurt may return. HEADS UP! I’d rather remember this possibility is real. Because the notion that right now, is actually the time, FINALLY, when we all get to go back to “normal” for good….Maybe normalcy is back. Maybe it isn’t.

This I do know. COVID is still a pain. A pain in the…. well, you get the picture.

I suppose the one piece of goodness I can still take from the badness is this: pain almost always makes me spiritually grow and grow up.  Pain, for all the struggle: it usually changes us. Deepen us. Make us return to our faith or recommit to our sacred beliefs. It can make us more powerful and more resilient. Pain—physical, mental, or spiritual—I know this is the thing that has most forced me to change in this life. 

I don’t seek pain out, no. No one does. And the God I love doesn’t inflict pain either. But when pain shows up—and it always shows up in every human life--we can’t negotiate away this truth. When pain stops by and when times are tough and when the valley we walk down into is dark and full of shadows, I often kid myself. “GREAT! Another blasted growth experience!” But there is truth to this.

The pain of COVID has taught me just how much I need and I love my family and friends. I hope I never, ever, EVER again take them for granted again.  The pain of COVID has taught me what a deep responsibility I have to care for the most vulnerable, the very sick, the very old, the very poor, the uninsured, because they certainly suffer more than me. The pain of COVID and almost getting it (knock on wood!) reminds me how lucky I am to have access to quality health care, and it moves me to work so that one day all folks have decent health insurance. The pain of COVID and its isolation has made me more fully appreciate doing things live and with real breathing, living human beings. Going to a baseball game or the movies or choir practice. Yes, it’s a risk still but I’ll take it.           

Will this hurt? If you have to ask the answer is probably, “yes.” But thanks for the heads up!