I was visiting a friend in Baltimore, a bird-lover who was taking me to the spot of a seasonal birdwatching attraction: the roosting of a great flock of Chimney Swifts in an old industrial chimney, still rising above its repurposed factory. Through some curious twist of evolution, Swifts roost on vertical surfaces, rather than upright, and are named because they roost communally in chimneys. Each fall, the Swifts returned to this industrial area for a few evenings on their migratory way South. Among the 15 or 20 people gathered to watch was a mother with her small boy, about five years old.
The boy and I struck up a
conversation when he pointed to a picture of a lost cat on a flyer stapled to a
telephone poll and asked me, “Have you seen that cat?”
“No, I haven’t seen that cat,”
I said. “I don’t live in Baltimore.”
“I live in Baltimore,” he said.
“Oh, well I live in Washington,
D.C. I’m here visiting a friend.”
“Washington?” he said. He
looked at his mother as if for confirmation of something, then back at me. Then
he exclaimed, “The news!”
Yeah, the news—way, way, way
too much news.
Which was why I was grateful
for this retreat to experience the natural world in the sky. More than seven
months after the beginning of the pandemic, I’d had too many zoom meetings, too
much time in front of a screen, too much social media, too much news, too much
politics, too much panic and uncertainty and fear—and too much of all of it
enacted in some virtual sphere outside of the real, natural world.
Mind you, this was October.
And I am one of the lucky ones.
I work in the “information sector” in a job that can be done from my home with
little disruption. My daughter, now 22, is launched into the world on her own,
and I can wake every morning missing her but grateful I do not have to
supervise remote learning while working. I am reminded of these blessings every
day.
It turns out that at 60 I may
have something else in my favor—my advancing age. Some recent research looking
at people’s responses to the stresses of the pandemic in the journal JAMA
Psychiatry found that adults aged 65 years or older had much lower rates of
anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, or trauma- or a stress-related disorder
than younger generations. The findings mirror those of other high-income
countries, including Spain, Canada, and the Netherlands.
A couple of important caveats:
these are older adults living in the community, not in nursing homes or
retirement centers; and the data is from early in the first months of the
pandemic. Still, the data suggest something interesting about the way people of
different ages respond to a uniquely stressful event that has affected the
entire human population. The authors surmise that older people may bring to the
stresses and isolation of the pandemic features unique to their age group that
have helped them to cope: the consolation of memories, the perspective that
comes with having been through trials before and survived, a knack for savoring
simple things in everyday life (a walk in the park, a conversation with a friend),
and an appreciation for the quality of a few close relationships over having
many superficial acquaintances.
These are a form of
intelligence we know colloquially as “wisdom.” But wisdom, by definition, is a
product of time and experience, only in the rarest of circumstances accessible
to young people. While the rates of anxiety, depression and trauma-related
stress were all under 10 percent for older people, the rates for people age
18-24 were staggering: 49%, 52% and 46%. Along with the revelation that 18
teenagers in Las Vegas had died by suicide between March and December last
year, we can surmise that we have been witnessing an adolescent cataclysm in
mental health.
The return to in-person
schooling has been a fraught subject. I am well aware of the concerns that
teachers and parents bring to the subject (and aware, too, that I speak from a
position of privilege, not having to decide about sending a youngster into a
school building).
But I fear that our young
people--teenagers especially—are just missing out on too much. Even some
partial return to school will not bring back, until the pandemic subsides, the
ritual celebrations that are landmarks in a young person’s life: graduations,
proms, sporting events that bring together students and the community in
celebration. These are the real, true (as opposed to virtual) stuff of
experience that leads to wisdom.
Which brings me back to the
Swifts. As dusk fell, the birds began appearing from all points on the
compass—as if called by some music pitched beyond the hearing of humans—and for
the next 20 minutes or so would circle the chimney in an ever-growing gathering
as the birds arrived, 500 or more, from every part of the sky.
Just before the sun dipped
below the horizon, they began one by one, then in greater numbers, to dive into
the chimney where they would roost for the night. As they dove, the circling
flight grew tighter like the funnel of a hurricane, winding its way to a finish
as the last of the birds disappeared for the night.
I have never seen anything like
it. The memory of it—and my pictures and videos—will endure as a highlight of
that terrible year. There is a music, a communal rhythm woven into the fabric
of nature, and into our human nature as well. May this pandemic speedily end
that we might return in person to celebrating birthdays and baptisms, brises
and bar mitzvahs, first communions, graduation ceremonies and proms, weddings
and funerals. These are own ritual gatherings, evolved over years to correspond
to that music only you and I can hear, the real, true thing, the wisdom of our
species and the only real news you need to know.
