This week it seems like people are starting to settle in to our shelter-at-home lives. Scratch that. Rather, I think that our shelter-at-home lives may be starting to settle into us. We are creatures of habit and our brains learn ways of doing things so that we’re not always expending all of our energy bewildered by every day tasks. The more we do things, the less we have to think about doing them. Some people in the U.S. have been staying home for a month, where I live we’re coming up on 3 weeks. I can feel myself adapting to newish routines, even as it’s disorienting to stop and think about how dramatically our lives have changed in a relatively short period of time.

I have asthma and among the medicines I used to control it is Advair, a capsule-based inhaler that the commercials point out “is a long-acting treatment and will not treat acute symptoms.” It’s a steroid and my doctor’s orders are to minimize use of this drug to avoid risk factors that are something like a million to one chance. I’m only supposed to take it when I’m in “the yellow zone”: when I get a cold, when seasonal allergies are particularly bad, or when I know I’ll be spending more than a few hours around a cat or a dog.

Usually, the yellow zone is a couple days to a few weeks max. Each inhaler unit has 60 doses in it and the last one I had for over a year. Last week, I ordered a new one from my pharmacy and I’ve been taking it every day for several weeks. The most important thing they say about corona virus and asthma is to keep your asthma as well controlled as you can to make sure your lungs are in their best shape if you do contract the virus.

So, I’m in the yellow zone. I’m doing something that carries risk in order to minimize a much larger one. Indefinitely.

We’re all in the yellow zone right now, aren’t we? We are living lives without normal human interaction or activities that present challenges to our mental and emotional states, but are necessary mitigation for the bigger threat. And now that our bodies are starting to absorb these new ways, we’re coming down a little from the frenzy of initial shock and learning to live in a yellow zone. The looming question is “how long will this last?”

In the beginning of January, in a wonderful state of excitement for the new year, I checked out these two library books, intending to fly through them before my winter break from school ended:

I did not fly through them and I exhausted my allowed renewals, but the library closed two days before they were due and dropped all due dates. Indefinitely.

That word keeps showing up. It’s not as easy to build muscle memory for uncertainty, so in some ways this feels harder than the early panic did. One of my sisters tells me that human adults are generally able to plan the specifics of their lives for six weeks into the future. If you look at your calendar, you may see lots of stuff on there for a bit, but for most of us it will clear up after six weeks. That’s the length of time our brains are able to envision the particulars of how our days and weeks will work. Six weeks is a rolling time frame. We’re always adding another week onto the end of the chain, building that road we’re walking on as we go.

But now we’re stuck in a moment when adding on to the end of that six week trail is nearly impossible, so it’s a little like we’re heading toward a cliff. And that feels way weird. I always have lists upon lists of things that I want to do that do not require leaving my home: books to read, shows to watch, craft projects, writing projects, yard work, finish unpacking those last (clearly unnecessary) boxes from when we moved in almost a year ago. And right now, I feel motivated for pretty much zero of it. I wonder if it’s because it feels like there will be tons of time for it, or just that it’s hard to think clearly in the yellow zone.

I hate to say it, but yellow has never been my favorite color.