Joy in Darkness

When I saw this photo, taken at my daughter’s house, I found myself in an odd place located somewhere between overpowering love and pain. My 6-year-old granddaughter had been trying to teach her almost-two-year-old sister how to wear a mask (so far not very successfully) and she thought that putting masks on their “stuffies” might help.

There is something so moving about this and also so sad: how well the 6-year-old seems to have adapted to a world in which Elmo or Elsa naturally wears a mask and then the perplexity of the almost-2-year-old who has seen her sister and parents mask up but likely thinks the mask’s primary purpose must be a game of peek-a-boo.

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So in the practice session, the younger one holds the mask up and pulls the elastic bands straight out to cover her face – but doesn’t tuck them behind her ears. (Masks also make good hats and they wave in the air like brightly colored flags.) Two years into a pandemic that began just weeks after she was born, she is a happy toddler blissfully unaware of what she is missing. The day of reckoning, however, is coming. Per the CDC (and her parents), when she turns two that mask goes on whether she likes it or not. She joins a world that changed just weeks after her birth, maybe changed forever.

Much has been written about the mental health impact of the pandemic on people of all ages and socioeconomic groups. The isolation of the elderly in assisted living facilities, the pain of young people who are defining themselves in a world of greatly limited and constantly changing possibilities, the deep sense of loss in families that are grieving for grandparents, parents, spouses, or siblings, the ordinary pain of lives and worlds made smaller by the risk of infection, the illness, the learning loss, the hunger, even, simply, the weariness of it all.

Looking again at the photograph, I wonder what the kids are really thinking. Will they normalize it? Will they accept as given a world that turns itself on and off as things spike and un-spike? Will they internalize the idea that illness is always out there ready to put them at risk? Will they go on from there to build their lives happily around a different sense of normal or will they carry a sense of foreboding with them wherever they go? We don’t know the answers yet any more than we know what so-called endemicity will really look like.

An otherwise unconnected event illuminated for me part of an answer to these questions. In the recent screening of a Beatles documentary first shot in 1969 just before the band’s breakup, viewers can watch the unfolding of the album that would become “Let it Be” (and parts of what would become “Abbey Road”). Perhaps especially for

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those of us who grew up with The Beatles, but even for those who did not, there is something quite extraordinary about the eight hours in which we get to live inside their creative process. The group started when three of the four were in their early teens (15, 14, and 13 years old) and the viewer gets to witness the ways that deep, long-held friendships, inevitable conflicts, the power of two huge egos (Lennon and McCartney), and an extraordinary measure of talent all come together to create something truly joyful.

Watching the creative process in process, watching songs we know being imagined and revised in the moment, watching old friends and sometime-rivals working together, and seeing the utter joy of playing, singing, dancing, joking, riffing, improvising, and doing it all again and again, makes one realize how much power there is in deep human connection, how much joy is possible in creating, and – sadly for many of us right now – how much that joy is missing.

Some of the best moments are both thrilling and eerie, as when George Harrison struggles to get a grasp on the hauntingly beautiful love song that will be “Something.” The song was just coming into being in these hours with his mates, and we are there as witnesses to its creation. As we watch, we realize that we know the missing pieces that Harrison has not yet found. We find ourselves singing out the words, filling in the gaps.

We know even more—that the band will soon split up, that spirited and gifted John Lennon will be murdered ten years later, that George Harrison will die of lung cancer in his 50s, and that Paul McCartney will lose soon-to-be wife Linda Eastman to breast cancer after thirty years of marriage and four kids. There is a sense of joyful, if also conflicted, camaraderie and of an extraordinary creative collaboration that is simultaneously full of foreboding.

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Even so, my dominant experience of the film is one of joy. I am aware that, for many people, creativity, and the joy it brings, seem like luxuries. When you are hungry or sick or poor, other needs come first. But joy should not be a luxury. It’s what makes people feel alive. It connects us to each other because it is shared; it’s contagious in a good way.

It also serves as a strong counterforce to the anger and hostility that are spreading like their own kind of virus – everything from aggressive driving and road rage to passengers punching out flight attendants to the rudeness of strangers to each other in all kinds of everyday settings.

A counter-example that makes the point: my husband called to cancel a routine dental appointment the other day (who wants to have a wide-open mouth during an Omicron wave?), but, being a gentle soul, he commiserated with the person on the phone – noting how hard it must be to do her work during this troubling time and apologizing for the cancellation. Several minutes later, he got a call from the office thanking him for being kind and commenting on how rare this is: most people who call up almost immediately become angry and hostile. Imagine that – a thank-you call for the routine act of being polite on the telephone.

Pandemics – and the toxic politics that have exacerbated this one – do us all incalculable harm. So perhaps it sounds na?ve to suggest that we all need to find opportunities to experience joy and to tap whatever we have within ourselves to bring it into being. For some that may mean meeting up outdoors with friends, playing sports, experiencing the wonder of children or grandchildren, going to the theater (mask in place), playing music – or in this case, watching others create and play it. Joy is an antidote to anger and depression. It is also an expression of human possibility – not what we are reduced to at our worst and most limited but who we are and what we can create at our best.

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