It would be nice to escape right about now.

The trouble is, there's nowhere to escape to. And even if there were, they'd probably cancel your flight out.

So here we are, dealing with a reality that is once again not cooperating with our wishes. My heart goes out to anyone whose plan—whose life—has been upended by the new variant, along with all those who were already suffering before Omicron came to town. It's really hard.

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My mind feels mushy.

It's like I'm peering out from inside a cloud. It's hard to think or even hold up my head. It's definitely hard to write this.

I hit my limit this week. I had to do some work that is really hard for me. Objectively, it was the same "sit at the laptop and type" as always. But I was fighting a significant amount of resistance. Doing the thinking felt almost physically painful. Maybe it actually was.

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Vacation, a holiday, time off. For me, it used to mean travel. A complete disruption of routine. An opportunity to explore something new.

What does it mean when I’m stuck at home? There’s no travel. The routine persists. Exploration is limited — so is the new and novel.

As a teacher, I tend to have a lot of opportunities for time off. This year, I’ve greeted most of them with, “May as well get some work done.” There’s been so much to do and so little energy for accomplishing it, so the extra time has been helpful.

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Sometimes, on a typical day when the The Little Middle School is in session, we’ll split the group: Whoever would like to go to the park can do so, and whoever wishes to stay and work can do that.

Inevitably, the park-going children are exuberantly loud when they return unless we take a moment to help them recalibrate before reentering the building. They’re still using outside voices and taking up a lot of space. The kids who stayed to work will look up in dismay and shush their noisy, boisterous counterparts. They had settled into the zone, and they find the disruption jarring.

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During my career as a music teacher, I would usually demonstrate things very slowly, at a tempo that my student could match. However, sometimes, I would demonstrate a passage at speed (meaning, at the performance tempo) so that they could hear how it would eventually sound.

When I did this, my student would often forget about the “eventually” part. It sounded cool, and they wanted to try. They would attempt to replicate it at the same tempo, with poor results. If it didn’t work, they would try again several times in quick succession, leading to a stuttery, messy sound.

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