We need to find ways to carry on in our changed world

Matthew Cullen of Ipswich gets a hug from Governor Charlie Baker at the Massachusetts Down Syndrome Congress’s Buddy Walk in WakefieldEDDIE VARGAS PHOTOGRAPHY

The Boston Globe

Beverly Beckham

A friend, just back from a week in Arizona and still on Mountain Standard Time, was saying that he felt tired. But it was more than tired. He shook his head. He couldn’t explain.

He followed up with a description of Phoenix with its flat streets and the mountains surrounding it and his trip to the Grand Canyon and the joy of being with family after so long a time. He was animated talking about these things. But it’s his first observation that stayed with me. He was tired, yes, but he was more.

For a few seconds, my friend acknowledged his feelings. But as he continued to talk, he dismissed this awareness. He subsumed it. His gratitude for being with family, for finally being able to hug them and laugh with them and travel with them, eclipsed everything else.

And I thought, isn’t this exactly what we all have been doing? Dismissing what we have been through? Getting on with our lives. Giving thanks. Being grateful. Hugging. Smiling. Subsuming our misgivings and anxieties? Carrying on.

What struck me as I continued to think about my friend is that jet lag is easy to fix. A few nights of sleep and his internal clock will be reset and he will feel like himself again.

But all the sleep in the world can’t fix that feeling he could not describe, the feeling many of us live with.

We are not some weary travelers trying to adjust to a different time zone. But it is some kind of lag we have because we are, most of us, a little out of sync. A friend is able to go out anytime, no quarantine keeping her home. But too often she doesn’t want to go out. She likes being home. She is used to it. I’m traveling again but it took an emergency for me to get on a plane the first time. And if people I love didn’t live far away I’m not sure I would fly anywhere for pleasure. If changing time zones takes its toll on us, and it does, imagine what two years of isolation has done? We lost two years. And during those years, we changed. And the world changed, too.

It looks the same out there, that’s the deceptive part. Orange leaves. Halloween decorations. Shorter days. Chilly nights. COVID didn’t alter Mother Nature.

But it altered us.

We haven’t acknowledged this yet. We haven’t had a day or even an hour of thanksgiving or celebration or reflection or remembrance, a time when, as a nation at least, we stop what we are doing, the way we stopped in mid-step on Thursday, March 12, 2020, when the world shut down. Travel from Europe to the US was banned. The NBA suspended its season. Disney World, Disneyland, Universal Studios closed. Broadway shut down.

And we all hunkered down.

Everything is open again. Countries. Theaters. Sports stadiums. But the openings have been staggered and sporadic. There has been no game over. No finish line. No cheers from the crowd.

We need a game over. And cheers from a crowd.

There were cheers from a crowd last Sunday at Massachusetts Down Syndrome Congress’s Buddy Walk in Wakefield. It was the first in-person Buddy Walk since 2019 and it was huge and joyous. And for me it was a game-over, a celebration over worry, over fear, over limitations and, in a big way, over COVID.

I’ve been to Buddy Walks before and they have all been fun. But this one was a victory march. There were hugs and kisses and I thought, this is what we need more of. This is the kind of thing that should be taking place all over the country. Because COVID did not break these families. It stole time from them. It restricted them. But it failed to steal their joy.

Governor Baker was there and he saw this and was moved. “It’s been a very challenging previous few years,” he said, “not just here in Massachusetts but around the country and around the world. Anxiety’s been high, disruptions have been everywhere. There have been tragic moments for everybody along with an enormous amount of unhappiness and difficulty, and honestly it’s hard for me to think of a community that is kinder, more positive, or more decent than the folks who are part of this community here in the Commonwealth. My message today is very simple and very short. I’ve come here five times and like everybody I missed it in ‘20 and ‘21 because honestly in ‘20 and ‘21, the vibe that comes out of this event was exactly what we all needed when we were dealing with all the rotten stuff that was going on.”

All the rotten stuff. That’s what we have to acknowledge before we can move on. Something awful happened, but here we are together again, more grateful than we ever were before.