Patti Smith’s new blog at Substack features an essay about the difficulty she feels (which many of us may share) of re-engaging with the day-to-day now that we’re all beginning to slowly but surely re-emerge from the pandemic. Anxieties still remain, Smith says, that continue to hold us back and tamp down our motivation to be active participants in life again. “There is an underlying anxiety, uncommon and certainly unwanted. I know I am quite capable of doing all that there is to be done. Yet an odd paralysis, combined with diminished enthusiasm, seems to hover over everything, like a post pandemic dust.” However, in spite of this, she seems to have located an elixir after inadvertently happening upon a video on YouTube of R.E.M. performing “Losing My Religion” at Glastonbury.
“Listening to R.E.M., watching Michael perform, I felt a rekindling of enthusiasm, a desire to be in a sweaty tee-shirt before my own microphone with the happy mission of mass connection” Smith says. In other words, to paraphrase another R.E.M. song, the time to reenter has been engaged…
Read Patti’s blog entry on “Reentering” here.