Learning to float

Waves are the medium, and the message

In December 2004, just before a tsunami slammed into Sri Lanka and India, elephants ran for higher ground. Dogs wouldn’t go outdoors. Flamingos abandoned low-lying breeding areas, and zoo animals rushed into their shelters, refusing to reemerge. 

Soon after, a magnitude 9 earthquake in the Indian Ocean unleashed giant waves, killing more than 150,000 people in a dozen countries. Surprisingly few land animals were harmed.

Anecdotes of animals anticipating earthquakes date back to 373 B.C., when ancient Greek historians recorded that rats, snakes, weasels, and centipedes fled the city and headed for safety days before a devastating earthquake. 

There are several theories about what’s going on here. One is that some animals, including elephants, can perceive low-frequency sound waves and vibrations from foreshocks that humans can’t detect. Another is that animals can sense the first of an earthquake’s seismic waves—the P-wave, or pressure wave, that arrives in advance of the shaking S-wave.

But no one knows for sure.

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I’ve been thinking about waves. About the kinds we perceive and the kinds we can’t; those we control and those we have no choice but to ride. This pattern that suffuses nature, carrying information and energy, only a tiny fraction of which we’re equipped to apprehend. 

Last month my sister gave birth. I was with her in the delivery room for 15 hours, watching a monitor map the contours of her contractions, spooling out a continuous, folding printout of the waves rippling through her body.

I’d get up to check it periodically, stretch the paper straight and count the sections between the peaks, broken into minutes like bars on a sheet of music, looking for the rhythm, trying to will it faster. But these forces were gathering on their own time. 

When the contractions finally started coming more quickly, things got rock n’ roll very fast. Her husband, the midwife, nurse, and I gathered around her. I held one leg, the nurse held the other. We’d watch a wave start to build on the monitor, and catch it like surfers, say Are you ready, come on now, push! push! push! OK one more! Now rest. 

The wave would pass and we’d all bob around in the lull, slack and weary, until it was time to paddle up the next coming crest. Finally, after three and a half hours of pushing, Azelia (Zeli) washed ashore, screaming and miraculous. 

Photo credit: Alex Hockett (This is the photographer’s newborn son, not my niece)

It struck me later that I’ve been seeing that pattern everywhere lately — the rise and fall of a line on a graph — in the waves of Covid washing over the world. We’ve all been studying the shape of its wake, trying to explain it, assign credit or blame for the surges and sudden declines. 

But so far it’s been a mess. We haven’t been able to draw any clear links between the waves and human behavior. “We’ve ascribed far too much human authority over the virus,” says Michael Osterholm, who runs an infectious disease research center at the University of Minnesota. 

There’s something at work here that we can’t yet discern — a modulating force we can’t identify, let alone control. 

When we do try to stifle a wave here, it pops up over there in other forms: deaths of despair, years of lost learning and connection, missed cancer screenings, surges of violence, widespread mutual fear, anxiety, and distrust. There’s no escaping these stormy seas.

I bring Alvin lunch every other Thursday on my bi-weekly Meals on Wheels route. He’s 94, has one arm, is almost entirely blind, and very hard of hearing. Every time he opens his front door, he’s a little fainter, a little fuzzier, as if his edges are blurring, his physical self becoming more diffuse. 

All these bodily functions and parts have left him, and last winter, so did a son who died. When I ask him how he is, he says, everytime, “Oh you know, could be better, could be worse!” He has a twinkle, but it’s increasingly clouded with worry that he won’t be allowed to live in his home much longer.

I have a friend whose mother is fading deeper into dementia. He says it’s like watching a wave recede into formlessness, as she loses the edges of herself, of time and place and meaning. 

Meanwhile, little Zeli is gathering, growing, busy becoming. Three weeks old now, her cells are dizzily dividing. She’s gaining weight. Her eyes are coming into focus. She’s conjuring an identity, swelling into a discrete wave in the sea of consciousness, as these others — Alvin, my friend’s mother, so many more — are sinking back into it.

Relinquishing shape and form, letting go. 

Other things that come in waves: light; sound; seasons; violence; peace; hope; grief. Colliding black holes unleash gravitational waves — ripples in space-time that Einstein predicted but we’ve only recently developed the technology to detect. Primordial gravitational waves produced by the Big Bang still echo throughout the universe. Reality itself seems to speak to us in waves.

As I write this, we appear to be teetering on the peak of the Delta wave here in the U.S., just about to tip over into the longed-for decline. We don’t know why. More waves will surely follow — who knows how big or tall or wide. 

Each wave of cases and deaths so far has been accompanied by a wave of anger, fear, and blame. Understandably so. I’m learning to accept that I can’t control these mass psycho-social tides any more than we can control an airborne respiratory virus. I’m trying to learn how to ride the swells without going under. I’m trying to learn how to float. 

I do wonder, though, what it would look like if we tried to ride these waves together with more kindness — if we found a way not to let them tear us apart. Maybe in the coming lull we can try to paddle our way back toward each other, make a plan for riding out the next one with a stronger grip on each other’s hands. 

Ultimately, we’re all going to the same place — back into the sea from which we came. I don’t think that’s the worst thing that can happen. I think it’s the only thing that will happen to all of us. While I’m up here, bobbing around, I want to feel the sun on my face, cede my illusions of control, and remember that what’s real is what connects us. 

This storm has been worse for some than for others, but we’ll all have our turn on choppy seas. The lesson I want to keep and carry is about the buoyancy of surrender. Things could be better, sure, but they also could be worse.