Imagine you’re running a marathon and you’ve just hit the 24 mile mark. You’re feeling exhausted, but everyone is cheering you on, and your coach reminds you that you have just a little bit more than two miles to go. Some part of you wants to just lie down and give up, but you know that when you look back on this day, you want to remember that you finished the race. You summon that last bit of stamina and finish the 26.2 mile race. It wasn’t always easy, but you made it and now you get to celebrate your accomplishment!
Now imagine, that as you pass the 24 mile mark, your coach yells at you there’s a possibility the race might end up being 28 miles. This especially frustrates you, because you signed up for a half-marathon, but when you reached the 13 mile mark, your coach told you the race was going to be extended. You’re exhausted, but you know you have enough stamina to make it 2.2 more miles. But 4 miles? Maybe not. And there’s no confirmation that 28 miles will be the end, either - given how many times the finish line has already been shifted further away, the race ultimately being 30 or even 40 miles feels well within the realm of possibility. You feel pretty unmotivated to even attempt to finish the race because you have no idea how long it’s going to be, so you just throw in the towel.
At least for me, these marathon stories reflect very closely how I feel about life under coronavirus. If there was a clear finish line, I would feel far more content and less conflicted. If, for example, we knew with 100% certainty that coronavirus restrictions would be over on March 1st, I would do everything in my power to follow each and every one of the coronavirus guidelines imposed by local officials for the next two months. Why bother eating out now if I know I could eat out every day of the month in March if I wanted to? Why bother seeing friends in person when I know I just have to wait two months? Why bother visiting a relative when I know we’ll see each other during summer vacation? Why worry about students missing school when they're all going to go back in March?
But that’s not the world we live in. The pandemic is not a marathon with a set finish line, it’s an ordeal where the finish line moves all of the time. And in many cases, its movement is for understandable reasons. New information comes in all the time, so setting a hard end date is very difficult. But that doesn’t change the fact that all of the periodic shifts make it infinitely harder to adhere to coronavirus restrictions. How can I give up this Christmas with family when there’s a distinct possibility next Christmas will be cancelled too? How can I continue to live this kind of a life I despise so much when I have no idea when it will end? Sure, the distribution of the vaccine has offered a lot of hope. But even with it, estimates for the end of this nightmare continue to vary and change. Those in charge often use very vague and noncommittal language. Take for example, this quote by Dr. Fauci: “If we can get the overwhelming proportion of the population vaccinated by let’s say the end of the second, the beginning of the third quarter – by the time we get into mid-fall of 2021, we can be approaching some level of normality.” In this single sentence, Fauci uses the words “if”, “let’s say”, “approaching” and “some level”, all of which imply a heavy level of uncertainty. And I get it - Fauci really can’t say when the pandemic will be over because there’s no way to know. But without a hard stopping date, complying becomes so much more difficult. For the record, I have complied, but every day it gets more difficult. Especially when articles like this get published across mainstream media, suggesting we will never return to normal. We’re approaching a year under these crippling measures, and many people seem perfectly ready to live another one just like it. If you’re one of those people, then more power to you. But the prospect of another year like 2020 scares me far more than COVID-19 itself, or any other disease, or really, any other danger for that matter.
If I could see the finish line, I would not feel this way. Even if the finish line was far away - June, July, August - so long as I knew that the finish line was going to be the finish line, I’d be content. But the finish line instead behaves like the horizon - as you walk towards it, it still appears just as far away as it was when you first started travelling.