Nobody told me there’d be days like these. Strange days, indeed. John Lennon
I am lying on the floor. Staring out of the window at the tulip tree. It is beginning to shoot leaves. It is always later than the other trees. The soft green of the fresh, unfurling folioles is contrasted against the impossibly blue sky. Cotton wool clouds slowly drift above the tree. Moving imperceptibly slowly, like an armada of diaphanous vessels, floating into battle. I am struck by their freedom.
Today is the 261st day of lockdown. Not in succession, but a confusing roller coaster of changing restrictions and momentary bursts of normality.
For 20 months I have not recognised my life. We are, all of us, navigating unchartered territory.
Laying on my yoga mat and looking out of the window, I feel anxious.
My understanding of the way in which time passes has been completely reframed. My deepening practice on the mat, my awareness of breath has been mirrored, in synchronicity with my subtle connection with the changing seasons outside my window. I feel connected to something that I was unaware of until almost everything else had been taken away.
I feel anxious. I do not want to lose this newly discovered relationship in a whirlwind of long-awaited dinners, catch-ups, and social normality. In amusing entertainment. In diversion.
I struggle to name this otherness to which I have become attached. It is a space and a void, but it is everything. I can lose hours passively watching it pass by my window. It is complex, it is comforting, and it is intrinsically compassionate.
“Two weeks to flatten the curve”. Had anyone postured that these two weeks would stretch into 80 weeks of varying degrees of limitations, fear, unfolding horror and the loss of so much that we take for granted, not one soul would have believed them.
We watched as China, then America and then Europe fell to this emerging malady. Feeling anxious and panicked, but remote. Surely, we would elude this situation. Australia is generally isolated and detached from world events.
My friend in New York sent me video of boarded up shops and empty streets. I had been there six months prior. New York was unrecognisable. There were refrigerated trucks outside hospitals. Another friend in Italy was not allowed to go out her front door with her husband. They had to exercise separately. Police were checking papers.
We watched the news nightly, in complete horror. Mass graves being dug by people in biohazard suits. It was like a dystopian science fiction. It felt unreal, as though it was happening in another dimension. A different reality.
And then the numbers started.
The numbers were small, at first. A case here, a case there. Random and unmenacing. The numbers climbed a little, we locked down harder. We triumphed and things returned to a “new normal”. A COVID normal. Sporadically appearing. Threatening the old and the immune compromised. Quick responses delivered quick results. Our island home was an oasis of safety.
Until it wasn’t.
My soon-to-be sister-in-law and her husband, in Canada, tested positive. The numbers transfigured immediately in my mind. These were not numbers, these were people. The numbers that I was checking, with sickening frequency, were people, with friends. People with families. People with futures and aspirations.
The numbers were overwhelming. I had to stop checking. I limited myself to once a day. I spoke to my sister-in-law on video chat. She looked grey and her spark was very dim. She was breathless. She was isolated from her own children.
The news was frightening. Not only with never-ending tales of the nefarious pathogen, but with unrelenting conspiracy theories which were becoming increasingly ridiculous. The then leader of the free world was a maniac. The world had gone completely mad. There was no balance. No sense of order.
The lockdown became the centre of everyone’s conversation. Speculation on numbers increasing or decreasing. Freedoms coming or going. State borders opening and closing. Daily press conferences. Public health officials becoming household names.
This plague had arrived at the shores of our closed borders with great vengeance. Melbourne was to be COVID’s most liveable casualty.
I am nearly 50 years old. I have memories of the cold war. The dread and fear of the “Russians”. However, I am not American: the obvious target of nuclear aggression should it occur. The AIDS epidemic was terrifying: though I am not gay. It affected me but I was a step to the side of it, cloaked in the protection of my childhood. September 11, the Bali bombing, Iran, Iraq, all these things happened in other places. To people who were not like me.
Coronavirus, COVID.
When a virus can board an aircraft, covertly and invisibly and be on the other side of the planet in 24 hours, it has the potential to affect everyone. It now pervades every corner of our planet. It continues to spread, devastatingly unseen. In every country, on every island.
No person is immune to COVID, even after vaccination, even after recovery. We are in the process of building our collective immune response. Herd immunity, of some level, will see COVID ever-so-slowly ebb and become less virulent and less cruel.
We will learn to live with the virus.
It is paradoxical our experience of pandemic has fallen just outside the living memory of any single human. We look at it historically. We do not look at it with enough assurance that the people of the past have something to offer us. There is an assumed arrogance that modern people have nothing to learn from what has come before.
Almost every change in our lives was predetermined. We hypothesised a different reality for ourselves. The tyranny of distance through time. Our ancestors coming to similar conclusions to those we are establishing now. The verdict…an unnerving realisation that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
Time softens the edges of experienced events. It washes over the memory with a shimmering, translucent gossamer, tempering the fear and the sadness. Fear belongs in the future. It doesn’t hold much sway in the past. That position is reserved for guilt.
How will this time, this world event, this life-changing and unprecedented moment affect the collective conscience of humanity? Will it impact us for the greater good? I believe it has the power to do so.
As I lie here, staring at the leaves, contemplating the sky, I feel a visceral longing, an almost desperate anxiety to retain what this virus has given me. It has gifted me time. On so many levels. In so many guises. Time is a construct we have built in our lives. A societal tool used to organise, engineer, and frame our reality. We see it as lineal and direct. There is so much more to the passage of time than this simple counting of seconds…of minutes…of hours…of days…of months and of years.
Every second is one we will never repeat. The hours of longing to be free. The time spent bemoaning the rules and regulations. The complete powerlessness of being under a curfew and a 5-kilometre rule. The feeling of being made invisible and unrecognisable behind our mandated masks. The inability to see friends and family. This removal of perceived freedoms has, ironically, lead me to the greatest freedom of all.
The freedom associated with resilience. The freedom attached to certainty. The deep and profound understanding of myself and the world around me. In losing control, all control, I have found a complex and meaningful relationship with time: and consequently, myself.
I cannot control what happens to me, or around me. I can control how I respond. Here lies my certainty. Not in the things that I plan in my diary (which has long since become a receptacle for recording memories and other uncancellable truths; rainfall measurements, days in lockdown, kilometres walked, movies watched). Rather, in the awareness, I am enough. I will continue to mark the passage of time. Sometimes it will be with deep sorrow, sometimes with elation and joy. With absolute certainty, time will continue to buoy me.
These strange days too, will pass. The unprecedented strangeness and the memory stamped on our biological timelines forever. The memories will, like all memories, soften. Time will slowly bathe them in translucency. Despair will degrade, panic will recede. Time will endure, unconcerned.