I am practicing scales on the harp again. My hands struggle to pluck in unison while I wince as my uncalloused fingers resist the strings … C, D, E, F.

I am practicing because it is the practicing time of day — that is, after dark. It’s my “quarantine project.” G, A, B, C.

“Phineas and Ferb” sing out from the living room, which is weird. My teens outgrew them years ago, but somehow they are bonding over them now. Back down the scale, C, B, A, G.

My husband says I should practice more slowly. He says every musician makes the mistake of playing too fast. Thinking of that brings a prick of tears, because I am a musician, a good one, except on fiddle, not harp, and right now my band can’t play together. I wonder how much I’d be willing to pay for a moment of eye contact with another musician, that unspoken agreement that it’s time to move to the next tune. That connection is impossible over Zoom.

But that’s just it. I can think about what I’d pay for that. What would low-wage workers of color pay right now to be out of the line of COVID-19 fire? It doesn’t matter because it’s money they don’t have, and all of us are seeing why — systemic racism, generations of policies that disenfranchise them, brought into stark relief in 2020 by little strands of RNA that supposedly don’t discriminate but are felling people of color at unconscionable rates.

I wonder, though, are all of us seeing it? Or do I see it because I have already devoted years of my life to the deliberate seeing of such things? Are the people who voted Trump in 2016 seeing it? What about the people who complained about the homeless of Northampton a few short months ago?

I have been “working from home.” My job does not require me to breathe air dancing with virus particles on public transportation, in essential retail or in a hospital. Instead, my administrative team at the Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter School has been tasked with educating students remotely — students that so many (including, often, themselves) had given up on even before this happened.

Our students — 79% economically disadvantaged, 94% of color — are deeply loved by us, but that will not keep them learning. Our teachers know that their primary task at least for now is to keep calling, keep inviting them to stay part of our community. We have found most of them, but many won’t complete assignments.

“They’re at school, but they’re all hanging around in the halls,” is the metaphor our principal offers. But is it that they won’t do the work? Or is it that they can’t, traumatized by the state of things in ways that I, with my spacious house and more-than-adequate salary, can’t really fathom?

We’ve heard the anecdotes: one 17-year-old working 40 hours because she’s the only one in the house with a job, someone else helping younger siblings learn all day, teens sleeping until 2 p.m. to avoid the chaos or boredom of their apartments, a kid whose obsolete phone — their only link to online assignments — overheats and craps out if he does too much work on it.

Not to mention the same specter of illness and death that we are all dealing with, magnified by those statistics and those preexisting conditions and those circumstances that force people to choose between their safety and enough money to buy diapers.

One family has lost no fewer than seven family members to COVID. DOESN’T ANYBODY SEE THIS? I scream in my mind, scales and vatuous harp melodies scattered. HOW DO WE ALLOW IT TO CONTINUE?

But I feel as helpless as I did when I saw it all before COVID, throwing my life and work into being a white ally, shouting into the void. The other night I read an article about the transfer of the virus from bats to humans. Because bats’ body temperature stays elevated for hours when they fly long distances, the viruses that infect them are generally fever-resistant. Ah.

That explains, perhaps, some of COVID’s strange effect on our human bodies. Then there are all the ways we have exploited the bats and this green Earth and the question of whether maybe the virus came from China’s CDC lab and not the wet market at all.

My head spins and I think, this is what it feels like to be in the middle of an apocalypse, slow-motion collapse. Things won’t ever be the same. Except, did the flu pandemic of 1918-1920 actually really change anything? Did it flatten the curve of progress, the trajectory toward more consuming and more busyness and more income disparity that accelerated through the next century until it wound up at the feet of people like me?

The more time I spend homebound, the more I realize how unsustainable my life was before this. How was it that I considered waking at 5:15 a.m. and jumping from task to task until bedtime normal, OK, expected? Will the fact that so many of us have had to slow down help us value something quieter, something closer to Earth and to peace? I feel like this will only happen if we bend our intention to that deliberately.

Meanwhile, our executive in chief gives voice only to our collective impatience. Can we go back to normal now? How about now? How do we bend the trajectory, not only of the pandemic’s spread, but of our collective consciousness in this time of cocooning? I call some students to hear what life is like; others share “pandemic journals” they are writing for history class.

I learn that the assumptions I’m making about their home lives are maybe not accurate — either that, or they don’t want to share the worst of it with me, a casual adult acquaintance from the halls of school. One writes, “Today was a very successful day for me, I took some time … to focus more on my poetry and writing short stories because when I am in school I don’t have the time to write the stories and poems that I think of.”

Another tells me that, while she’s stressed about school and politics, she also is glad to be spending time with her family — they’ve made homemade pizza and cake — and she’s been painting and meditating to do some “higher self” work. She says they are OK, moneywise, with one parent still working as a painter, mostly alone and thus safe.

I guess we really all are in this together. The glaring unfairness of race and class is in relief right now, but so is our common humanity. All of us, I think, have asked ourselves at least once during the past six weeks if we are who we want to be, if our world is what we want it to be.

If you are reading this, I ask that you hold all of this in your heart with intention: the inequity, the fear, but also the opportunity to open back up not to the old “normal,” but to something more human, more hopeful, more connected.

Kira Jewett teaches at the Paulo Freire Social Justice Charter School in Chicopee.