By Pete Buttigieg March 20, 2021 12:01 am ET
A few weeks ago, I was invited for the first time to a meeting in the Oval Office. I had always wondered what it was like inside; but when the time came to enter, I did so in disembodied form, wheeled in on a TV cart to join the meeting by Zoom because I was in quarantine at home after being exposed to someone who had tested positive for Covid-19.
It was one more strange reminder of our now year-old pandemic reality. We are still nowhere near a mature understanding of the lessons of this national experience, as it continues to unfold in what we all hope is the beginning of the end. Yet some things are coming into focus.
As a country, we have learned some lessons the hard way: the importance of leadership and clear public-health guidance, the vulnerability of the workers we have belatedly come to call “essential,” and the cruel persistence of inequities in American health and well-being.
Then there are the more personal things we have discovered. I’m among the Americans who have learned some surprising lessons of telework: that a video meeting can be less intimate than a phone call, that not commuting to work can be strangely exhausting, and that having more time doesn’t mean getting more done.
Meanwhile, my husband Chasten and I learned the basic negotiations of marriage all over again, swapping the challenges of absence and constant travel for the equal and opposite challenge of being in each other’s presence all the time. Once we were within earshot at all times, a short word or facial expression became the equivalent of a whole discussion, replacing the more straightforward text messages or phone conversations once forced on us by constant travel. Clumsily at times, we have learned a new, more finely tuned vocabulary for talking to each other.
Last fall, teaching at Notre Dame, I realized how dependent I had become on the subtle signals of faces rising and falling as I spoke. Masked and socially distanced, I would try to figure out what my students were telling me based only on what they said out loud—not nearly enough to fully sense how they were responding to the course material. I became an expert reader of eyebrows, extrapolating whole facial expressions like a scholar reconstructing ancient texts from a fragment.
In the evenings, it was the opposite challenge: faces but no sounds. Campaigning by Zoom for 2020 election candidates I supported, I came to depend on responses in the “chat” function to reveal what used to be detectable from a murmur or a chuckle at an in-person function.
Ultimately, I learned how little of what we have to tell each other is communicated in words, even in word-heavy disciplines like politics and academia. As we contemplate returning to a world without masks and constant telework, will our capacities to interact with each other be profoundly weakened, like unused muscles, and need to be retrained? Or will our old ways of sensing one another be intact and even enhanced by the new ones we have been forced to evolve? If all goes according to plan, we will know the answers soon enough.
—Mr. Buttigieg is the U.S. secretary of transportation.