Finding Meaning in the Midst of Crisis

Today is May 1st, the 47th day of lockdown for me. While I know many people are experiencing losses and grief, rampant anxiety, and a sense of numbness that affects their ability to write, I've found this to be an incredibly fertile and fruitful time in my creative life. I'm seeing so much beautiful and profound work from fellow creatives, I know I'm not alone in this.

Prior to the COVID lockdown, I was feeling fairly strung out. I truly wanted everything to stop so I could catch my breath, which feels oddly and tragically ironic now. But here we are. In a moment that is reminiscent of the aftermath of 9/11 when the world seemed to be upending itself and we stood on a precipice of change without any indication of where things would go from here. I remember the same questions from artists, writers, and other creative people -- how do I keep working? how does the work I've been doing have resonance in this moment? do I keep going with the same projects, change them to reflect this new moment, or start something new? how do I keep myself from feeling despair?

This moment has taken me back to what is essential about creating art, to a guiding principal I admit I haven't thought much about in recent years as I've gotten wrapped up in the pursuit of publication for my novel: that writing in particular, and art in general, is a way to express what it means to be a particular human being in a particular moment in time. This has always been my true north.

I've also noticed, in the way we have turned to the arts in the midst of our various shelter-in-place orders, we are looking for these points of connection. It seems as if we are saying, tell me about your experience of this moment and help me understand my own.

This has always been the power of the arts and why I have long thought the emphasis on STEM at the expense of the arts is short-sighted and ignores the very powerful human need for connection as a way to understand and process. While the arts will never find a cure for COVID-19, we turn to the arts to make sense of our world. We create art to make sense of our own reality. In this moment, the arts enrich our lives with beauty, they provide a respite for our over-stressed minds, give us a way to express and process our distress and communicate our pain and confusion and fear and hope. Most importantly, they give us a language in which to be human together.