Hurricane, mindsets, zombies... oh wait, not those

Before the storm hit, I bought several pounds of blackberries on sale. I've been baking with them since then: buckle and muffins. (When I'm stressed, I cook. One of my housemates cleaned. The other bought loads of beer. Our house is pretty awesome.) During the storm, we played Scrabble. We still have water, power, internet; we're not in the flood zone; the grocery store around the corner is open. We are very lucky.

However - the larger picture is a bit more grim. The subways are full of seawater, multiple neighborhoods are flooded, 80 houses burned up in Queens from a fire, the Con Ed building in Manhattan exploded, most of lower Manhattan is without power, and the parks are full of downed trees.

Everything has just... stopped. I know that can't be true, but it seems that way. It all feels strange and eerie - like when you almost get into a car accident. You're okay, but you're suddenly aware how easy it would be for things to go very wrong. You realize how vulnerable you actually are.

You start to do the side-eye thing when you go out. Zombies? Are you there? No? Good.

I think the one thing that all New Yorkers have in common - the lucky ones, I mean, who are complaining about things like spotty internet service - is that we experienced the storm together in the same way. We spent hours inside, waiting for the wind to get bad, getting bored and antsy, but for once we couldn't leave. Time stretched out and took on a new shape - we wasted hours and hours. There was nowhere we could go - no bar, no bodega. We all had to cook for ourselves, and not order takeout. (Not that I do anyway. I'm a egg-on-toast, frozen soup kind of girl.)

And, despite joking about it, we all started to imagine things together. When you're buying emergency water and batteries, you have to imagine what it would be like to need them. We all read about the storm together - saw the worst, the fires and floods, and realized it could have happened to us. We had to spend days on end with our housemates or loved ones, and really share our space and time. (If things at home had been tense before, they were sure as hell a lot more tense now.) For New Yorkers who don't mind sharing their homes with near-strangers, this storm made some incompatibilities difficult to ignore.

And now, even though the storm is over, life isn't going to be back to normal for a while. Many buildings are destroyed - businesses, homes. People are waiting in long lines to charge their phones in the outlets at all-night ATMs. My friend Josh walked 20+ blocks north, in Manhattan, to find places with electricity. My brother is sleeping on someone's couch on the Upper East Side, and is fighting gridlock to take an old black car to work. There are downed trees everywhere. I saw pictures of my friends Josh and Jesse, walking over the Brooklyn Bridge, and the lights were out all over Manhattan. Everyone had to be out by the time the sun went down, and it got too dark to see.

I think that the storm gave us each a lot of time to think about our lives, our living situations, our choices, and ourselves. When the lights went out in the city, I think a very primal sort of evaluation took place for many people. If you can't count on civilization to function flawlessly, what can you count on? What do you have? What people can you count on to be there? If there are no people, what do you have left? (Spoiler alert - the answer is not "nothing".)

This is the kind of thinking that people did a lot more often back in the olden days, I bet. Nowadays, we push back our fear of the unknown with electric lights and order. Nobody wants to think about how, in the end, we have little control over forces like weather, disasters, sickness, the feelings of others. In the dark, we are very small. And when we're afraid, we're more likely to start thinking we're helpless.

But! Luckily! This is not actually true.

...At least until we turn into zombies. But until then, everybody has a center of resolve and grit inside themselves that, when tapped into, can take the place of that helplessness. We all decide how to approach life, and the world. You can either approach it from a place of reactiveness, fear, helplessness, self-pity - or from a place of discipline, action, compassion, and optimism.

A healthy helping of cheerful graveyard humor helps, too.

Sometimes you have to be a bit Polar Bear Club about it, I think - just jump right into that icy water, yelling and laughing. Now is a good time to read Kurt Vonnegut.