Shared from the 3/21/2021 San Francisco Chronicle eEdition

Living a year in a pandemic teaches you things

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Joseph Pisani / Associated Press 2020

At times during the past year, demand for toilet paper was so high that some stores couldn’t keep their shelves stocked.

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Associated Press 1940

The soothing effect from Winston Churchill’s words during the bombing of London in World War II was temporary.

Among other things, this COVID crisis has been a learning experience. Some of the lessons have been mundane, some interesting, some useful in a practical way. Some may even end up being profound or life-changing.

Here is my list of things I didn’t know a year ago, that I ended up learning — whether I wanted to or not — while sheltering in place during the pandemic.

It pays to be 40 rolls ahead: Apparently, when people get scared, they start buying up toilet paper (who knew?), so always being 40 rolls ahead is the way to go.

Worst thing that happens? Eventually, you die with threedozen unused rolls, and your heirs get to split it up and have a party.

Best thing? You’re prepared.

I don’t really need to go grocery shopping: In my previous life, I spent a lot of time shopping. Thanks to grocery delivery services like Instacart, I won’t do that anymore — though some produce items I probably should buy in person. For example, a few months ago, I received a cabbage picked during the Truman administration.

Still, overall, the convenience is worth the minor risk.

I will never read history in the same way again: I used to read that Shakespeare or Samuel Pepys or Boccaccio or someone else had to spend a year and a half indoors because of the plague, and then I’d turn the page, not realizing what that actually meant. A year and a half may be a paragraph in a biography, but an eventless year and a half, to people experiencing it, might be the longest 18 months of their lives. And these people didn’t even have Netflix.

You don’t get through a long-running crisis by deciding how you’re going to feel about it: I’ve been reading about the bombing of London during World War II for years, but I’ve been imagining it wrong. I’ve been imagining Winston Churchill making a speech and everybody feeling better permanently. What I didn’t quite realize, until recently, is that a long siege has its ups and downs, good days followed by bad days, and mood swings even from hour to hour. And you don’t get to decide how you’re going to feel about anything. You’re going to feel what you’re going to feel.

About two months ago, I went through a phase where I woke up every morning exhausted. This was alarming to me because I am normally wide awake in the morning. But here I was, dragging one foot in front of the other, just able to work, but barely. So I went to the doctor and got checked out and found out that I’m fine. Apparently, it was just low-level depression. I didn’t feel sad, just tired. But apparently, that’s how depression can work.

Since then, I’ve been talking to other people who report the same sorts of things — periods in which they can’t get out of bed and other periods in which they can’t sleep. I’d prefer to steamroll over inconvenient feelings, but sometimes they steamroll you.

Videoconferencing is helping to define our social priorities: Before the pandemic, we saw our co-workers a lot more than we saw our friends. But the pandemic has taught us that we can get a lot done, in a business sense, while working at home, with Zoom there to help foster a requisite level of warmth and conviviality in work relationships.

Conversely, Zoom has not been able to replicate the pleasure of actually being in the company of friends. It has made the absences a little bit easier, but it hasn’t been a substitute for the real thing. Thus, post-pandemic, I expect to see a lot more business Zooming and a lot more nourishing of personal relationships.

I took the world for granted. I won’t anymore: Human contact. Hugs. Dinners with friends. I can’t imagine ever again saying, “Oh no, we gotta go there?” No, I want to go there. I don’t even know where it is, but I’m practically there already.

This is your life. You’re allowed to do what you want with it: In 2020, millions of people around the world died of an illness they hadn’t heard of on New Year’s Eve, 2019. They may have been worried about something that night, but they sure weren’t worried about COVID.

This has been a cruel, cruel period, and if we get anything out of this experience, it should be the courage to do what we dreamed about doing in lockdown, but couldn’t.

For example, I would very much like to buy a place in rural France. Before the pandemic, I was thinking “Yeah, maybe.” Now I want to do it. It’ll take some focused effort, including actually learning the language for real this time. But I’ve talked about it, talked about it, talked about it and talked about it — at least as much as the people in the song talked about going to Funkytown — and now I feel like it has to happen.

For you, I’m sure it’s something else. Good. Whatever it is, do it, so long as it’s your heart’s desire.

Just remember: When we’re free of this pandemic, we’ll be freer than we ever were, because this time we won’t just be free. We’ll know it.

Mick LaSalle is The San Francisco Chronicle’s film critic. Email: mlasalle@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @MickLaSalle

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