I AM easing into the notion of being at home all the time. My commute, no longer a stowed-out number 7 bus, consists of falling out bed and stumbling down the hall to a makeshift desk set up my spare room. At the end of the day, I go from powering down my work computer to slobbing out on my sofa in 10 seconds.
In tales of newfound domestic bliss, my book shelves are now organised alphabetically and my kitchen hob has seen more action over the past five weeks than in the seven years I have owned it.
Life is considerably slower and I find I am trying to trick myself into pretending I like life better this way. Some mornings, walking along the canal near my home, the sun on my face, I almost believe it. Still, it doesn’t feel right. Should it?
People keep calling it the ‘new normal’. But it’s not. This is not the resurgence of slow living that society has been crying out for. Nothing about this is, or feels, normal.
Social work professor Dr Brene Brown calls it the “collective weary”. Our adrenaline surge in a crisis, she says, is never as long as need it to be. Especially not now. We are in this for the long haul and navigating this new era requires grieving the loss of normal, even though it is temporary, while seeking a suitable replacement for the way of living.
All of this seems like a perfectly sensible response to what we are facing. Taking up home baking and throwing ourselves into spring cleaning are welcome distractions, but there is value in leaning into our feelings. And mostly, I feel scared.
I thought I was well-acquainted with death, but not like this. My loved ones are losing their loved ones, every few days it seems. Funerals are streamed online.
I find myself checking up on people I know like a teacher checking names off on a register. When a friend tells me he is bedridden with fatigue, a knot forms in my stomach. It remains clenched there for a week, until he tells me that he is up, about and eating again.
A weight feels as if it has been lifted from my shoulders, at least until I hear my mother clear her throat down the end of the phone and the process begins again.
Amidst it all, I look for permission to fall apart a bit; to reject the ‘keep calm and carry on’ rhetoric that has dominated the dialogue around lockdown.
A friend pointed me to a refreshingly pessimistic piece of advice from philosopher Alain De Bottom. “I really wouldn’t want to advise anyone that this is a moment for cosmic serenity and stoic forbearance,” he says. “It’s very much a moment for losing your mind a little bit. That’s OK. It’s a good time to get lost.”
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