COVID-19: A Beginning
By Ree Murphy
Nationwide quarantine in the midst of an on-going election. Mental health issues bubbling to the surface of a sudden slowness in daily life. General disarray. Everywhere. All the time.
I don’t quite know where to begin in my response to COVID-19. I struggle to find the words to describe the deep feelings of loss, loneliness and lack of direction that crowd my mind in the quiet of my bedroom, a place that was a weigh station between Exeter and my summer programs for the past three years, a place that began this spring break as a stop between my last term on campus and the spring I would spend in Washington, D.C. A place that will now likely be my home for the next six months. How do you begin to mourn for the experiences you will never have? How do you say goodbye to memories that haven’t been made? How do you cry over a promise you didn’t realize was impossible to keep?
Had this all not happened, I would not be sitting at my computer, writing an opinion piece for The Exonian about the fact that I am not on campus. Instead, I would be at Exeter, sitting with friends in the Lamont common room and procrastinating on my statistics homework, or I’d be moving into Capitol Hill Hotel in preparation for the next three months of interning in D.C. At times, it feels as though COVID-19 took all that away—times where I am infinitely frustrated by the fact that I cannot blame anyone for the existence of a virus, times when I must remind myself that quarantines are necessary to minimize the larger impact this disease will have.
When I got into the Washington Intern Program, there were many people who asked me how I could possibly give up my senior spring, ‘Senior Spring’ being the catch-all phrase for the shared ending of things here at Exeter. Collectively, the spring of 2020 was to be spent reminiscing about the myriad happenings our class had been through together: a few principals, college scandals galore, protest after protest about everything from race relations on campus to sexual assault to Halloween costumes. Senior Spring was meant to be closure, a chance to finally breathe and experience the people we’d become after years of not looking up from our textbooks long enough to notice our own growth. It was meant to be a time for us to look forward to who we’d become, the journeys and paths we’d take after Exeter into a world we’d largely been ignoring.
I think, if there is anything to be learned from COVID-19 that isn’t just “how to wash your hands properly,” it is our deep need for a reset, for an opportunity to put everything on hold, to listen to our thoughts and our loneliness, to reflect on relationships in every capacity, and to practice kindness towards even those we do not know. To practice kindness to ourselves, physically and emotionally.
To our seniors especially, but to everyone, I think this is a time to ask the questions we may not have stopped to ask otherwise: What is it that runs through our minds when we are not busying ourselves with other things? Who are we when we are by ourselves? What do we desire? How are our feelings a representation of our needs, of our humanity, and how can we become patient with them?
In truth, I did not view going away to D.C. as the “giving up” of anything. I saw it as a rewriting of my ending here at PEA, a chance to step away from the pace of life there, to learn another way of being, to breathe. Perhaps, as we think of what we may have lost, we can challenge ourselves to think also of what is being offered.
Ever the lover of books, I believe that spring, both in literature and in life, has a way of beckoning towards reflection and rebirth, of calling to that place where endings ultimately become beginnings. This spring offers us many questions, but I think perhaps one is central: as the ice finishes melting, undisturbed on the red brick of our beloved dorms, as the roads of New York City finally sleep in the absence of people, as warm winds go unchallenged from a spring breeze to a spring-turned-summer heat, what is becoming?