Coronavirus, Living Homeless, Darkness, and the Future
Rich shares thoughts on Covid-19, living homeless in Chicago, the obstacle of Darkness, Generational Psychology, and the future of the United States.
It’s a heavy time. It’s a stressful time. It’s an uncertain time. There’s tremendous suffering and death. People confront the virus every day and help save lives. Essential workers continue to keep our country goin’ round. Coronavirus has impacted everyone—and in different ways—and we don’t know when it will end. No one does. The human experience has a wide spectrum of emotions. What makes us human is our empathy—our ability to understand the feelings of others because we’ve had those feelings ourselves and know what it’s like. The world feels much smaller right now because everyone’s been impacted. Everybody is going through something. Everybody.
All things considered, I’m doing well. I bartend a few nights a week in addition to my other responsibilities, so that’s no longer going on with our Illinois and Chicago stay-at-home order. The hospitality industry took a huge blow. Besides financially—and I certainly do mean financially—I miss our community at Lincoln Station. It’s like a living Cheers. The owner is great. My colleagues are all awesome. Our customers, especially our regulars, are fantastic. It’s a good time and great vibe. We’re just all ourselves. We’re very lucky to work in a place that encourages us to be ourselves while contributing to a larger goal. It’s grown to be quite a community. A lot of creative and talented people roll through there and everyone is working on something their passionate about. It’s really supportive. We certainly try to keep spirits high with our outrageous group text—and Instagram group for the non-iPhone users.
Overall, I support the stay-at-home policy and, so far, I’m proud of our leaders, Mayor Lightfoot and Governor Pritzker. I’ve felt safe with their handling until this point. But we’re going to be dealing with the threat of the coronavirus for a while, and I don’t think continually extending the order would be a good thing. We have to address the economic consequence of that. I think we can loosen it a bit and focus living smarter and more thoughtful. Pritzker just released a plan this week with how the state will go about easing the restrictions.
I see people post the specific number of days they’ve been in quarantine, but I don’t know mine. I was laying low the week before Saturday, March 14th and then I went to a wedding that day in the countryside. I’ve been inside since. I could see the writing on the wall with the stay-at-home order, so I got my stuff together. I created a massive list of items to knock out. A lot of these items had been things I put off for a while. Procrastinated. So it was clear to me what I needed to be doing. Over the years, I’ve learned I don’t like working from home. I like being social and in those kinds of atmospheres. You’ve probably seen me working in libraries, coffee shops, museums, wherever. I thought about my experience writing my first book, Homeless But Human, two years ago. The writing and reflecting process, as a whole, took over six years, but I scrapped most of it and wrote the book in six weeks. I was locked in. Pretty isolated and focused. I wrote half of it in my apartment. I figured I’d just do that again with all the things I’m working on. Let’s go!
What I forgot about was how exhausted I was after writing my book. Completely burned out.
The same thing was happening now. My sleep was completely out of whack. Just getting terrible rest. Waking up constantly through the night. My body was messed up. Every day was the same. Nothing to look forward to—except those two nights a week. The thing is I have a lot more self-awareness now. That wasn’t going to work, especially with an indefinite timeline.
Honestly, I think a lot about the time I lived homeless. I think about the psychology of it. You have to be so mentally tough. They don’t get enough credit. People don’t understand that. These are some of the toughest dudes in the country. It’s a mental feat. There’s so much bureaucracy and red tape and waiting around it’s so hard to stay hopeful. And in a pandemic, the community is so at-risk.
I don’t know if I’ve ever mentioned this, but another reason I decided to live homeless when I was 22-years-old, besides better understanding the issue and who it affected, was to see what I was made of as a man. I could see where life was heading. Graduate college, get a job, climb the ladder, buy things I don’t want or need, get married, own a home, have kids, etc. And that’s fine, of course. But I knew that wasn’t the next step I wanted to take. If I did that, though, I wondered when I would truly be tested. I thought I learned and grew a lot until that point. Why not put it to use in a different setting—a setting unfamiliar to me.
I remember one night at the shelter—this was early on—there was this guy named Curtis. He’d always have stacks of books and papers around him. He was a no nonsense guy. I asked him how many books he’s read. He was like, “Probably over four hundred. I read three books a week.” That blew me away. He said there’s not a lot of other stuff to do in prison. He got two degrees and was released in six and three years instead of eighteen. Here, I’ll read a passage from the book.
The subject of life sentences interested me. “I mean, if I got life in prison, I’d probably kill myself,” I confessed to him. The thought of being caged for the entirety of my breathing life depressed me. Curtis, however, didn’t flinch at all. He patiently nodded his head. It clearly wasn’t the first time he’d heard that.
“I can see where you’re coming from. That makes sense. But guys travel from one joint to another. They see so-and-so here and that person there.” He pointed in the air. “They accept that this is their life and look for new ways to find purpose. Many read, some become more spiritual, and others talk to kids and teach them about decision-making. Physical boundaries don’t mean your life is worthless.”
Curtis connected the ideas in my head, allowing me to draw a parallel between prison and my experience in the homeless shelter. I found meaning in his explanation of life sentences. Around two weeks in the shelter, I noticed a shift within me. Calmness replaced my sharp vulnerability. My mind accepted that living homeless was my current life. Though voluntarily homeless, the thought of abandoning this new life never arose.
That time of my life was so tough. To be honest though, life after it was probably tougher. Look at the last two sentences of my book. “I’m so exhausted. I’m so worried.”
That is dark. But it’s true. Years after I lived in Darkness. It’s only recently that I found Light. I’m not going back. That’s what my third book, Primary Ponderings, is about. It’s about transforming one’s life from Darkness to Light. It’s beautiful. But it’s not easy. We moved up the release date to next week Tuesday, May 12th. I hope it’s able to add brightness for people. It does for me. I’ve been using it as a tool, flipping through it for positive reassurance and confidence. It an art book that shines the philosophy I used to overcome years of Darkness.
So many people are experiencing Darkness right now. It’s blinding. It feels like you’re drowning and there’s no hope. We have to be considerate of that. We have to be patient. People are having a really tough time. I know how it feels.
Purpose is something that Curtis mentioned about people in prison. Once they accept that this is their new life. I think right now people are realizing that normal does not exist anymore. And it won’t in the future. We’ll be living under the threat of the coronavirus for a while. And the world that will emerge will be a new one. This is hard to accept if you don’t have a purpose in life. So challenging. We’re all confronted with emotions and thoughts about ourselves. It’s overwhelming people.
We have to face reality: We’re in a pandemic and people are dying and suffering. And we have to face the other reality: The pandemic will pass and life will go on. How will we handle this?
I want to mention a book I read back in January. It’s called Generations by William Strauss and Neil Howe. The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069. It came out in 1992. They’re sociologists that look at American history through the prism of generations and patterns. They identified four generational personalities in American history: Idealist, Reactive, Civic, and Adaptive. They all interact with one another and the events that occur. Of these four, two are dominant types: Idealist and Civic. The Idealist type experiences their rising adulthood (age 20-40) during a spiritual awakening in the country. This is your Baby Boomer generation. The Civic type experiences their rising adulthood during a secular crisis in the country. This is your GI generation fighting WWII and then creating the infrastructure of the country moving forward. Millennials are categorized as the Civic type. In the preface of this book, it reads:
“No one, for example, can foretell the specific emergency that will confront America during what we will call the “Crisis of 2020” . . . America will pass into a “Crisis Era” constellation and mood—and that, as a consequence, the nation’s public life will undergo a swift and possibly revolutionary transformation…The sum total of our predictions does not present an idealized portrait of America’s future, but rather an honest depiction of where the generational cycle says the nation is headed.”
We are in that crisis right now. And if we look at our history, what happens is the Civic type responds with leadership and redefines what the country is moving forward. Millennials have been the ones to convince older and younger generations surrounding them that this is real and that we need to trust science. Millennials have been fighting this on the front lines as essential workers as well as the ones transitioning their companies to remote working. As digital natives and the most educated generation in American history, we were built for this crisis.
That’s what gives me so much hope moving forward. When the pandemic passes, which it will, it will be our opportunity to take charge and lead the country as we envision.
When I lived homeless in 2011, I was so dejected. I thought by living homeless I’d have my questions answers but, instead I had more. It’s more complex than society makes it out to be. There was no solution. The only answer in my head was to create a better country. And now we’ll be able to do that in the very near future.
I can see it. I hope to be of use. It’s what I work towards every day.