These days, I go more easily on flights of fancy. People spend thousands of dollars on vacations to experience what I get to do for free when they go on a trip to a different culture but then they complain that the food is too weird.
There is some kind of beauty in having a more tenuous hold on reality than I used to have. I can look at a photograph and get drawn in, lavender fields in France, steep green hills in China. I get to float over them in my mind for as long as I want.
See, the thing I keep holding onto with all my long covid trouble is my students. The poor kids’ minds are being fed the most nutritious mental food injected with the worst spices of boring, hard, and serious. Sometimes, I feel so crappy but then, I sit down with a kid, she mentions chemistry, then we wend our way through the chemistry of cake and snowflake angles, look at videos of the art of repeating fractals, read about the benefits of reintroducing grey wolves into Yellowstone, pop into a book she needs to read, pause on a phrase of beautiful language, then spiral around inside the body talking about the amazing bags of chemical reactions that we are.
After we’re finished, her mind might go to a completely different focus, what her friends are saying on her phone or what other homework she doesn’t want to do right now. I, on the other hand, sit with my eyes closed on my recliner for a rest and can continue the journey of chemical reactions in my mind.
Thank you for listening, jules