Adventures in lockdown
This new world is different. Just like Lewis Carroll’s Alice in 1872, we are now submerged in a backwards place. Busy roads are quiet, concert halls and office buildings are silent, and galleries are closed. Time is not quite running backwards, but it is going at a different pace. We are all pawns in someone else’s chess game, seeking to adhere to the new rules imposed on us, established to ensure our own survival. These are crazy times. We find ourselves somewhere other. Things are familiar but wrong.
I have done a lot of internet skimming and reading over the last little while to try to understand it all, and came across a fascinating article by Eric Roston from Bloomberg Green (“Want to stop the next pandemic? Start protecting wildlife habitats“), and it made some sense to me. It talked about how important it is to protect our environment and give animals room to roam, so they don’t pass infections to humans. To “Take care of nature“. Recent research has given support to the idea that biodiversity protection in one part of the world can prevent novel diseases from emerging and leaping into another.
Are we now reaping the consequences of messing with natural systems and making them much more dangerous than they would otherwise be?
Which brings me back to where we are now. We are locked up, cut off, “sent to our rooms by Mother Nature to think about what we have done” (one of my all-time favourite Facebook quotes).
I always wondered how I would cope in a crisis, being someone very much ruled by my heart and not my head. As long as I have a purpose I am fine, but currently I don’t really know what that is. Everything seems so inconsequential, so pointless.
So, how do I feel two weeks into the lockdown mire? Pretty shit.
Scared of hearing the daily numbers but compelled to know.
Scared for the future. Will we still have jobs after this? How will we support our family?
Dreading my trip to the supermarket to collect supplies to keep the family fed. It is a place full of sanitiser and gloves and masks and people with no sense of personal space who all seem to be perspiring, sneezing, coughing and touching everything, or so it seems to me.
Worn out from nurturing and entertaining and cooking and checking that everyone else is doing okay.
Nervous on my daily dog walk – what if someone asks me how I’m doing – do I tell them I am good, enjoying the break, or the truth – that sometimes I start crying and worry I won’t stop, or how breathing gets hard when I think about what is and what will be.
I shop at midnight for my parents from my lounge, trying to book food deliveries for them, worrying that I won’t be able to secure a spot and they will run out of food… I’m not really sleeping, so I may as well do something constructive while the rest of the household watches Netflix and dreams.
I’m stuck in my head, and it’s not a sunshiny place.
Wandering in the world and making are usually my fall-backs when things get messy. Now I’m not allowed to wander, and I desperately want to make, but can’t seem to do it. I assemble materials, my notes and thoughts, but it doesn’t translate to my hands. I feel fractured, fragile and a failure. Time is wasting. This is the perfect opportunity to retreat to my making place, but I’m stuck in the doorway, frozen on the threshold, unable to move forwards or backwards. My brain is planning out my making path, ideas are still coursing through my burning neurons, but the bright flashes are searing holes in me.
Instead I sit, pace and fiddle. Flitting from one activity to another. Music loudly pulsing through my earbuds in an attempt to drown out the uncertainty. I never knew how much I relied on daily routines and work distractions to make order in my head, to keep it clear.
I’m not un-intelligent or un-empathetic, I know what I would say to my friends and family if they were in this spiral – be kind to yourself, exercise, get out in the world, develop a new routine and stick with it. Find your happy place and visit it often. But exercising makes me anxious, I am not allowed to go to my usual places, my routine seems pointless when no one else around me is sticking to one, and my anchor points are a couple of online work meetings a day which are mainly hypothetical, my happy place is hiding from me, it hovers just beyond my reach.
So, I try again. I gather my notes, my materials, my thoughts and sit at my making table. The kids are watching movies or doing online study, the husband is lost down a YouTube wormhole. My music is loud in my ears, I’m counting my breaths, and hope that this time my hands will transform my thoughts into something solid.
As Robert Frost famously said, “the best way out is always through“.
**Images by John Tenniel from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the looking glass and what Alice found there” 1872.