A resonant image: Marion from Wings of Desire after the circus has left town. The world and its buffet of options looms like a storm cloud. I think of decision paralysis, the ‘dizziness of freedom,’ and a couple of Andrea Zittel’s parables from These things I know for sure (2018):

What makes us feel liberated is not total freedom, but rather living within a set of limitations that we have created and prescribed for ourselves.
Things that we think are liberating can often become restrictive and things that we think of as controlling can sometimes give us a sense of comfort and security.

The vast expanse of the pandemic has illustrated that we can acclimate to and even thrive within a set of limitations that’s forced upon us. And now, we measuredly try to integrate some semblance of normality as the pandemic wanes. We lose the masks, we book the international flights, and again we have license to construct our lives piece by piece—our rules, our limitations. Yet there is that loss, that melancholia, and that anxiety that accompanies disaster’s end. We are free. We can breathe. Yet wasn’t there some earned sense of dignity to this containment, some feeling of being held, finally with everyone else? What will it be for this pandemic to be over? When all paths are available to us once more, will we be contented at long last, and will we call it freedom?