Voices in the Morning

It’s been almost four months since I came home for the quarantine. I’m in the suburbs now, where my parents have lived for the last 20 years. In the mornings, when the neighborhood still sleeps and the lawnmowers haven’t yet begun their Floridian summer sonata, I go out to run.

I take advantage of the emptiness and run in the middle of the road, against traffic, listening to different voices each day through the headphones that sit loosely in my ears.

You probably know of Elizabeth Gilbert — she wrote Eat, Pray, Love, other books and gave one of the first TED Talks that I ever listened to… about creativity. On a recent run, a Tim Ferris interview is on in my ear, and EG says this: “for writing to be great, it has to be surprising yet inevitable.” I stop for a second, and replay it on my phone. Surprising….yet inevitable. The perfect description of the opposite of my life lately.

As a person who feels best with even a minor dose of daily serendipity, I’m challenged at times by this quarantine and the repetitiveness in each day it demands. I’m thankful to be in a position where I can stay safely at home, but at the same time, I miss the unexpectedness of life in the wild. Waking up, going to sleep, and most things in between have become a bit groundhog-esque. Life is anything but surprising, and nothing but inevitable.

I wonder — where has surprise gone, and when does it plan to come back? When again will I have to break into a spontaneous sprint, begrudgingly, to reach the bus when it appears around the corner earlier than my app told me it would? When again will I have to be convinced by friends to do something, ultimately surprising myself in a miscalculated moment of apathy with an, “Ok, let’s do it,” and a few hours later not wanting to stop?

There’s an unexplainable clarity that comes with making spontaneous decisions — a sense of momentary sureness that only surprise can fully summon. In these moments, you experience untainted, primal emotion as it rumbles to the surface, not allowing qualm to dilute its raw, human glory.

Making that decision is the exact moment when something that came so close to never coming into existence, did. It’s an opportunity that, when seized, can change it all.

What being at home in quarantine has shown me is that I took spontaneity for granted. I tend to see uncertainty -willingly and unwillingly- as a bad thing. It’s something I have to prepare for, to defend against, to decrease, vanquish and destroy.

I’ve meditated for the past years with the hope of learning to become okay with that uncertainty. To see it in a different light, to find ways to sit with it and to let it be. To live in the moment. But what this time in purgatorial pause has helped me to start to understand is that I can learn to enjoy the unexpected. That surprise is nothing more than uncertainty with a new paint job.

And that this same uncertainty is an inevitable ingredient of life and our quest for happiness in it.