Rethinking Our Lives

Abstract

Abstract This chapter applies the framework of narrative imagination to an analysis of the psychological challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Narrative imagination brings into focus three key issues: temporal fluidity or “time traveling” in which the past, present, and future are intricately and repeatedly interwoven; the relationship between the real, the not-real, and the not-yet-real; and the complexity of constructing “the other.” The dynamic nature of the temporal includes a revisiting of the past, reimagination of present lives, and a recognition of new hoped for and feared futures. Different policy decisions and political implications are examined in terms of their status as real, not real, and not-yet-real. Finally, the pandemic revealed and exacerbated already blistering chasms of inequality—racial, socioeconomic, geopolitical—while at the same time troubling conventional discourses of “otherness.” The chapter concludes by identifying the post-pandemic task as one of (re)imagination: our once hoped for future depends on a rethinking of our past.