ON the morning of May 23, Daniel Thorson rejoined society after an absence of two and a half months.

He had spent that time in silent meditation in a cabin in a remote northwestern region in the U.S. state of Vermont, where he is part of a Buddhist monastic community.

Thorson, a podcaster and enthusiastic online philosopher, had also missed 75 news cycles. And so, less than two hours after ending his silent retreat, Thorson logged back onto Twitter.

“Did I miss anything?” he wrote.

The last week was a strange one for Thorson, 33, a staff member at the Monastic Academy, as he tried to catch up with the changes that had taken place during his absence.

He learned of Boris Johnson’s hospitalization — and his recovery. He learned that meatpacking plants had emerged as pockets of infection and death. He learned that his cousin had met her new love interest on a social-distance dating website. And that there is now such a thing as a Zoom channel devoted to ecstatic dance.

Re-engaging — with his mom, with the supermarket, with the Internet — was at times intensely pleasurable. Other times it was just intense. He had trouble sleeping.

People wanted to talk to him. They compared him to Rip Van Winkle, the fictional character who falls asleep in the Catskills and wakes up 20 years later to discover that his beard is a foot long and the United States is no longer ruled by the British Crown.

It stunned him to discover that the many and various topics that interested him had been subsumed by a single topic of conversation, the coronavirus. That feeling of confusion deepened when, during his first week back, American cities erupted in protests over the death of George Floyd.

Thorson is not the kind of Buddhist to shy from current events.

After graduating from college, he was an organizer for Occupy Wall Street, camping in Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan and engaging with pedestrians. He logged a few years with the Buddhist Geeks movement, promoting the use of online technology for enlightenment seeking. His podcast, “Emerge,” seeks to explore “the next phase of the human experiment.”

So he was eager, after ending his 75 days of silence, to see what was going on in the world.

“I was thinking, is it going to be ‘Mad Max’ out there, like are we the last survivors?” he said. “How is humanity doing?”

After leaving the meditation center, the first evidence he saw was a gas station, and people coming in and out wearing shorts, a scene so characteristic of northern Vermont that he was deeply reassured.

“It’s Vermont,” he said. “Somebody’s getting gas.”

But a new set of impressions followed. He ventured into a Shaw’s supermarket eager for human contact, and what he found instead was anxiety. When he passed people, their eyes darted around, as if they were scanning for threats. One thing that seemed to scare them was Thorson, who had not gotten the hang of social distancing.

“I would turn a corner in the grocery store, and someone would be there, and they would recoil,” he said. “I haven’t installed the COVID operating system. At first, I was, like, ‘Whoa, what did I do?’”

He had looked forward to plunging back into his online world, a setting he had always found “nourishing.”

But when he reviewed two and a half months of posts from people he admires, he found, to his shock, that they were only talking about one thing. “Everything else is gone,” he said. “There’s nothing about the election! It’s amazing! The Australian wildfires, what happened there? Didn’t Brexit happen?” 

(SD-Agencies)