I am about to dip a toe… no, to wade… oh hang it, to plunge… into some very choppy waters. So here are some gratuitously pretty Easter pictures for you to enjoy, even if you hate me for what I am about to share.
Many professional writers are confessing to finding themselves ‘blocked’ during this lockdown (while poets are producing some sizzling work, but that is another story). I am, alas, no great shakes as a poet. After all, why use 3 words when 300 will do?
My own major work in progress, Brother Joe, is therefore in limbo (sorry Joe. Your time will come, your story told. Just not quite yet.) This is partly because the storyline, planned long before the outbreak of COVID-19, covers the 1919 Spanish influenza pandemic and dealing with that feels a little too prescient at present.
One of my creative writing ‘tutees’, whom we will call Joanne, confessed last week to finding it hard to settle down and write anything. I decided that a simple diary piece would be an appropriate goal for our next ‘literary encounter’. I then opted, somewhat rashly, to support Joanne by writing one myself.
Well. At first, of course, I avoided the task altogether. I felt guilty, too, for wanting to do other things; everything, anything but write, in fact. Then I tried a step-by-step documenting of my day, as agreed with Joanne. I reread it the following morning to discover that I had risen, dressed, walked, gardened, read, spoken, eaten at punctuating intervals and then gone to bed. Exactly the same everyone else? Not quite. Not in one majorly significant way.
Only once I began to wonder why this should be the case did words began to drip, and trickle, then flood out of me. What you have here is a distillation of that.
Joanne soon contacted me to say that something similar was happening to her. Should she stop? No, I replied. Let’s surf the wave and see where it takes us. I have to say that what she has produced is far, far better than this piece, which amounts to an expiation.
The thing is, you see, that I am happy. There, I have said it. Happier than I have been for years. Isn’t that just appalling? Especially when those around me are increasingly stressed and miserable. I realise that it is an entirely peculiar and selfish happiness, but it is also the honest truth.
Yes, of course part of me is still very much afraid. I know more and more people are dying, many in grim circumstances, unacknowledged in the official statistics. I know our beloved, beleaguered NHS, starved of political empathy and funding for so many years, is on its knees. I know I may also in part only be feeling this way because I am locked down in a beautiful, tranquil rural part of the Scottish Highlands little, as yet, affected by COVID-19. I also know that I may hate myself next week or next month if the situation worsens.
Why is it I cannot bring myself to scurry around the local paths during my exercise hour, eyes fixed grimly on the ground, as many seem to? Why do I find myself stopping, standing, staring at the clouds, noticing the subtle daily changes in nature?
Happiness in my life up until now has often been counterbalanced by extreme pressures (for various reasons) in both my family and my professional life. This paradoxical #lockdown contentment is a different kind of happiness. This list is my best guess at the reasons for it.
1. My closest family are here at home with me and all are well. In the past I have taken this for granted. Not any more.
2. I never again expected to have both my daughters, now young women, living with me under one roof for any length of time. That feels like a miraculous gift.
3. I have time to keep in touch with others I love via social media, phone and email. I am using my writing skills on digital platforms, a new adventure for me, and enjoying it. I am using my French to bring together French speakers from all over the country. I have always been happy to communicate by the written or spoken word, often more so than face to face.
4. The four of us locked down together (age range 17 – 74) are taking time to understand each other’s needs far better than we have done before. We are being honest with each other, possibly for the first time ever.
5. The daily hour’s exercise forces me to concentrate on my fitness. I am convalescing from surgery. Under normal circumstances I would probably not be taking time to recover properly. I am exercising gently but I am also resting. It feels so good.
6. After the initial shock and panic of no work (which for me means no AirBnB bookings, no teaching and no heritage consulting) we have worked out how much we can live on. It is surprisingly little. We will survive. Travelling as much as we did for work and for pleasure generates the need for more and more income generation. It is an unnecessary cycle.
7. I have set up a support group for my neighbours, and as a family we are helping them practically in any way I can. We are getting to know some well, one or two for the first time ever. We have not been near a supermarket or even placed an order online for over a month. I do not miss it. It is perfectly possible, here, to live locally. People are bartering skills, food, plants. This is the world I want to live in.
What these seven points have in common of course is the feeling of my world shrinking, of enjoyment derived from slowing down, of taking the foot off the pedal, hitherto so rare in life. There is also gratitude, not to terrifying COVID-19, but to the beneficial impact our response to it has had on our home planet.
Looking back at life before the epidemic, I feel like we were already collectively holding our breath, waiting for something to happen. Our excessive lives whirled ever faster, out of control. Planet Earth has been sickening for years and we have known this – and ignored it. The planet has now taken action to heal itself. Unless we heed this shot across our bows, we risk entering the Age of the Pandemic, of which COVID-19 is merely a mild foretaste. This virus could depart only to wheel, adapt, mutate, return. If it does, humankind could become a short and grubby footnote in the history of this ancient planet.
Will I be glad when this #lockdown ends? Of course I will, but again, not entirely. I have greatly valued this time of being able to stop, draw breath, think. All I pray is that those in power realise that things must never go back to ‘normal’; that the old ‘normal’ was slowly killing us and destroying the planet on which we live.
Humanity now faces a stark choice: mend our ways – or become extinct. I am a resolute optimist and I believe it can and will happen – providing others, like myself, can also begin to say ‘Enough! We need a better way of life.’
Reflecting on all this, my heart still wants to dance. Yes, my logical brain knows that I too may catch the COVID 19 virus and die; but somewhere deep inside me a small voice, which may or may not be called faith, is saying yes, but you were always going to do that anyway. You were never immortal, even if your species likes to pretend it is. So live while you can, but live better.
Vee Walker writes... 