Lockdown thoughts

Covid lockdown changed me. Many of us. I joined https://hitrecord.org/ to feel connected to the world. I participated in some of their challenges. Looking back, I see how dark it was, how comparatively bright now.

This one was prompted by the word, "nothing"...

These strange days start with a slow amble towards a shared and formal breakfast and the last-quarter of the coffee cup question, "What do you plan to do today?"

Plan? Who can plan? I'll tidy the kitchen. Again. I'll catch some sunlight if there is any. I'll paint something if the inspiration strikes. Mostly I'll fritter away hours with social media pretending I'm not.

I can't afford a plan. It's just likely to get broken, become a disappointment. And then it will join the giant heap of things in our world that are currently broken, including my safe middle-class life where other people's suffering was just social media content. My life has been reduced to social media content now too, and it's not comfortable, can't ever be true, can only ever sound like another cliche.

So, I won't try to plan. Just cope with my middle class suffering as though it could stand up to comparison with those so much more exposed. The Youtube guru reassures me that all suffering is valid, all perspectives human. I'll go with that. What more can I do? There are policemen outside.

To make it worse, one of my daughters was newly qualified as a doctor, and was conscripted into a hospital where she was completely isolated form us.

My little girl, red plaits and freckles somewhere behind that tatty mask, how did you become an intern so fast? How is it that suddenly the fate of the many, the most vulnerable, rest in your hands (the ones with long white fingers and paint under the finger nails)? How can my desperate frozen meals properly feed your lanky little limbs at the end of long days in tired scrubs and frantic wards? How can I soothe your fright when you can't even come home to soothe mine? I know we'll be alright, my darling, because you'll fix it. You'll finish it up like a glue-gun school project and tidy up afterwards, because you were born for this!

A mother's helplessness as her child goes bravely, timeously, into the world to take up the fool's journey, the hero's quest.

Paralysis. How can I decide what to do? The scenarios play over and over in my head and I never find one with a better outcome. The variables all come from outside my control, and in mitigating them I am forced to make tighter and tighter scenarios until all I can do is sit perfectly still, do nothing, hope it will go away.

So much anxiety, so much not-letting-go-of hope. Clinging in our little mountain-side house to ideas which seemed more substantial than facts.

We're living in your slow motion time, Sacred Giant. Our world was fast, not so long ago. Fast, like "busy" rather than "speed". Now, we're trapped in that slow-mo shot, treading air as we careen into something chaotic, like You wait for ever for a tectonic shift, feeling the pressure compress You.

And looking out of the window over the view our little house gave us across the urban valley, hoping to find something true, something new, anything different to our house arrest.

Wishing I had a bird to send out over the floodwaters to bring back news of dry land, I send a prayer to Noah in solidarity.

But as my mind and spirit began to become familiar with the change of pace, I began to find joy in the mundane. What else was there?

The blanket cocoon was good, but the sun creeping through my skin is better, meeting coffee in my bloodstream. My edges sharpen up, the day will be good.

I began to cook slowly, count my steps through the house as joy in movement, I cleaned and sorted things, made space for new things. My living deepened, my priorities sharpened.

The stretch between the human and the divine

Self indulgence and discipline

Eat the chocolate, but not too often

Go to seed, but be sure to germinate something new.

One day at a time. I decided to hone my discernment, to increase my data access - more information means more material to sort, means a more likely, more accurate aggregate. That the truth by which we must navigate forwards is somewhere in the mix.

We've hit the event horizon. Nothing we know from the past can prepare us for what is to come. The media-mixed-messages make us examine what we truly believe in the absence of easily identifiable facts, and those neglected holy cows we kept on tripping over are now so inconvenient, we can't help paying attention to them lest we fall and break our necks.

What are the biases we cling to to help us sort our favorite factoids from the media pile? What data gets eliminated before it even enters the playing field because it has the wrong ticket? How can we be sure we've corralled the truth if we don't allow everything into our consideration? All sides of the debate wield blunt clubs called "Idiot", randomly beating us down like baby seals.

I'm not ready. But I'll never be. There's nothing familiar to cling to, and even my same old humanity might be changed to something I can't now recognize.

But, strangely, the lock down puts me into an interminable waiting room, stopping me dead in my tracks while I anticipate a tumbling fall into the strangeness of the new.

Every breath is an ironic reminder of what is at stake, and what I can trust in this moment. If ever there was a time for faith, it's now. And while none of the ghosts of the faceless and merciless gods of civilization reach out the hoped-for hand of guidance, we express our hope in small acts of kindness, indignation and house-cleaning.

And ennui.

The uncertainty is the worst - experiencing the outside world through the filter of curated and algorythmed social media, while the close reality of cleaning, cooking, managing relationships inside our walls takes on a hyper-attention to human physicality.

It's been weeks - who cares how many? There have been so many numbers, and today some Facebook guru says, ignore the daily numbers, just look at the trends. My trends are more to do with flagging inner resourcefulness under pressure from previous norms of productivity. The creative ideation ocean I used to swim in when "normal" was different to now (that other guy says there is only ever "now"), is all out-of-bounds and the injunction to "stay grounded" has become the only option. Thanks, Universe, I hear you. I'm here. I'm grounded, so grounded that the soil begins to pile up in measures of feet above my prone and paralyzed body. 

At his desk next to mine, my husband busily arranges books for company year-end. The children scurry past us to the kitchen between online schooling, video chats with mates and snacking. I'm a bit jealous of all that industry. Never been good at just resting.

My Facebook feed is punctuated by the virtue signalling of others in lock down. "You guys are so lucky you can just chill at home and still get paid - I've got piles of work-from-home. I don't get time off!". And, "You should just be grateful that you still have work, because some of us won't get paid while sitting at home!". And, "You're so lucky you get to go to work - I can't bear to be stuck in my house a moment longer!" And, "You should thank the Lord you have a decent house to lock down in - we have to share one toilet among five house-holds."

We're all so spoiled. So self-righteous. So unable to look past our own suffering, especially if it's suffering of the mind. 

X-number of days in, my roller coaster heart is guessing that there's a Zen moment somewhere along the track, but I can't see it yet. We're closer to the end of lock down than the beginning, but that might change one morning, like every morning when we wake up to the day's nationally devastating revelation.

We are where we find ourselves - the past that brought us here irrelevant in the now, and the future mockingly uncertain. So, for now, we ration out the special things we've put aside for "a special occasion". The porcelain, the crystal, the mead that's been brewing for years in the basement. And, because we're lucky enough to afford it still, we soothe ourselves with stashes of chocolate between meals re-vivified from Granny's WWII recipe book. We wear the odd home-knits as the weather turns, and let some of the home maintenance jobs lie unattended for another week. We make silly Pinterest projects to fill spaces made by Konmari cleaning just last year.

And we sigh a lot. Remembering the gift of breath. Remembering that we are human, sometimes Divine, always creaturely.

And what has remained - what has been the permanent change? Slow food, conscious breathing, treading the invisible labyrinth of my new garden, somewhere out of the city every morning, every evening. Gratitude, like blood in my veins. Walking on alive from the scene of tragedy, feeling the soil making loving contact with the soles of my feet.