I imagine I'm not the only one with "Covid friends." I don't mean new friends that I made in the hospital as Covid patients. I mean people that I reconnected with at the beginning of the pandemic, when Covid 19 was still called the Coronavirus. People from grade school, middle school and high school. Relatives, university friends, old work friends and friends of my mom. These folks may have been lost forever if not for Covid.
It's no doubt that living in Italy spurred the connections. There's nothing like a lot of really sick, scared and dying people to get your attention. Then put them all in a country known for La Dolce Vita (the sweet life) and it becomes a mini-series worth watching. And if you happen to know one of the characters it'd be hard not to tune in.
I happily accepted calls and emails from around the world and shared my limited view of the suddenly not so sweet life. Then, just as suddenly, the calls of concern about life in Italy became calls for advice about how to live with Covid in the rest of the world. There was a need to reconnect. People wanted to share and they were willing to listen. And it seemed like almost everyone had more time. Lockdowns, stay-at-home orders and quarantines meant people were available. But even those smartworking and managing kids' online lessons from their bedrooms seemed to find time for things they couldn't find time for before.
Then as weeks of living with Covid became months of living with Covid we were encouraged to get back to normal life (albeit with masks and alcohol). And unfortunately, it seems that for many, normal life often lacks the things you like and the things you consider important.
Collins Dictionary says "something that is normal is usual and ordinary and what people expect." That means returning to normal life comes with the expectation that we'll have no time to connect and share. If you start out with that expectation there's certainly less room for disappointment, but Dickens would be far from proud. According to Sparknotes, the moral theme of his Great Expectations is quite simple: affection, loyalty and conscience are more important than social advancement, wealth and class.
I'd like to think that what we didn't learn from Dickens we might have learned from the first few weeks of Covid. Making connections should be more about affection than social advancement.
I'd rather live a life with great expectations than live a normal life.
