Apparently, Dinner Is Still Required

One of the stranger things about having your life knocked sideways is discovering how little interest the rest of the world has in the situation.

You still have to go to work. The mail continues arriving. Dinner remains stubbornly necessary. At some point you will stand in front of the refrigerator hoping that food has developed a plan in your absence.

It has not.

Something enormous can happen, something that fundamentally changes your understanding of your own life, and yet there you are wondering whether you locked the door. Did I check the mail? Is the hair straightener unplugged? What is the password? No, apparently that is not the password.

The monotony of ordinary life doesn't disappear simply because ordinary life no longer feels particularly ordinary.

Going back to work is an especially strange version of this. You get dressed. You drive there. You walk through the door and are expected to perform whatever collection of tasks previously constituted a normal workday. People ask questions. You answer them. Computers require things from you.

Meanwhile, internally, you are approximately three raccoons in a trench coat pretending to be a person.

The raccoons do not know the password either.

There is a performance involved in returning to public life after something significant has happened. Not necessarily because anyone is demanding that you pretend everything is fine. Most people probably aren't paying nearly as much attention as we imagine. But public life requires a certain amount of basic functionality.

You cannot generally walk into work, announce that reality has become deeply suspicious, and then lie on the floor. There are protocols.

So you create a reasonably convincing simulation of functioning. You answer the email. You find the thing someone is looking for. You remember where you parked. You make a decision about dinner despite having absolutely no opinion about dinner and some resentment toward dinner for requiring your involvement.

This is, I think, one of the least discussed parts of continuing after life changes dramatically.

We tend to talk about the large things: surviving, rebuilding, starting over, moving forward. These are useful words, but they are enormous words. They make continuing sound like something you stand on a hill and decide to do while the wind moves your hair in a meaningful direction.

My experience of continuing has been considerably less cinematic. It has involved a lot of passwords.

For a while, I had to change mine repeatedly, which was exactly the kind of additional administrative enrichment my life needed at the time. Passwords are irritating enough under normal circumstances. Modern life apparently requires each person to maintain a private collection of increasingly complicated secret codes, none of which may resemble another secret code you have ever used.

Add a major life disruption and suddenly you are being asked to prove you are not a robot when being a robot actually sounds quite restful.

At least the robot probably has a password manager.

The strange thing is that all these tiny, irritating tasks can be both infuriating and oddly stabilizing. The door still needs to be locked. The mail still needs to be checked. Apparently, dinner is still required.

At first, that can feel almost insulting. How can something so ordinary require your attention when something so profoundly unordinary has happened?

But ordinary life doesn't ask whether you are ready for it. It just keeps leaving small things in front of you. Not the rest of your life. Just this thing, and then the next thing.

Sometimes that is exhausting. Sometimes it is comforting. Sometimes it is funny in a way you don't entirely know what to do with. Often it is all three.

There is something almost reassuring about discovering that even after the world has demonstrated its capacity for chaos, some problems remain magnificently stupid. You can be grappling with enormous questions about life and still be irritated because you cannot remember whether the hair straightener is unplugged.

For a while, everything feels different and not different at the same time. The same roads. The same grocery store. The same job. The same doors to lock and mail to check and endless nightly referendum on what constitutes dinner. You are moving through a familiar world while feeling slightly unfamiliar inside it.

Then, gradually, you stop noticing the contradiction quite so often.

You go to work and realize at some point that you were simply working. You make dinner without contemplating the philosophical injustice of having to make dinner. You leave the house and, perhaps after checking only twice, accept that the hair straightener is probably unplugged.

Life becomes less of a performance.

The raccoons disperse. Or at least they become sufficiently organized to pass as one adult.

I don't think there is a profound lesson hiding inside any of this. I don't believe remembering a password is an act of courage, and I am reluctant to assign personal growth to checking the mail.

But I do think we underestimate how much of continuing happens this way, in increments too small to announce. You do the next ordinary thing because it is there.

And somewhere along the way, dinner stops feeling like evidence that the universe has unreasonable expectations of you. It is just dinner.

Which is good, because apparently, it will be required again tomorrow.