The Days of Lockdown – week 7

30 April 2020: Challenges

We had the great weather. We had the King’s birthday. We have a school holiday. Normally, none of these things would be a big deal. In our new reality, each of these events test our mettle, our stamina, our resolve, our sense of responsibility, our will to self-denial. Each represent a choice, a challenge. Will we do the right thing, i.e. stay (close to) home and keep our distance? How long will we be able keep this up? When will we start to crumble? 

Our self-control is challenged in many ways: not only do we have to stop ourselves from hugging each other, we must also stop ourselves from metaphorically beating others over the head when we disagree on how to handle this crisis. The online vitriol and paranoia are spreading faster than Covid19 and could be equally fatal. How do we find one another when we are on opposite sides? We are living in the quietest time of our lives, yet it remains hard to listen. 

To pass the time, we have invented ‘challenges’ on social media: “for 10 days, post a picture of: a book that meant a lot to you; a record that shaped your musical taste; a photo of yourself as a performer when you felt empowered. No explanations, just 10 pictures.” No explanation? What’s the point of that? I want to know why that book/record/performance meant so much. Surely, most of us have seas of time now to tell and read these stories? Isn’t this the perfect period to get to know ourselves and each other better? Or is social distancing slowly turning into emotional distancing? Are we crumbling as human beings?

Source: Gaia.com

And then there are the challenges of the future. What will we do when we go back to ‘normal’, if that even exists? The Netherlands may well reach its climate goals for this year, if the lockdown goes on a while longer. That sounds like great news, but actually shows how much is needed to reach those goals: the whole country on standstill for months. What will we do about all the people who lost their jobs? Will we finally instate a universal basic income, or will we start blaming the unemployed again after a while for being ‘lazy’ or ‘unmotivated’, as we always do. Will we bail out companies that siphon off their cash to their billionaire shareholders in offshore tax havens?

It seems to me we have this one chance. If we mess it up, we won’t get a second. The ultimate challenge for humankind to show its true spirit. As I said, it is hard for people to listen, but I feel this is our way forward. Listen to ourselves - not our puny egos, but our essence; listen to each other, the stories of people close and far and really feel them; listen to the experts, instead of assuming we are all miraculously all-knowing; listen to the heartbeat of the earth and try to align ourselves with that pulse. 

We humans are made of stories. We talk about events in our lives as if they have a logical sequence, a purpose, a conclusion. In reality, they seldom do. So, let’s write a new story: of how humanity woke up from its selfish nightmare and saved the planet. Or, better still, let us, like the Aboriginals, sing a brand new world into existence!  

The Days of Lockdown week 6

 20 April 2020 - Sanity and sanitisation

At no other time in history have people washed their hands as much as they are doing now. Signs of sold-out sanitiser have never been so commonplace. It makes you wonder what the environmental impact of all this handwashing is: how much has our water consumption increased and what’s the effect of all that soap? In any case, the message has sunk in that we need to keep our paws pristine.

Human contact has been deeply sanitised too. Social distancing ensures that nothing ‘untoward’ will occur: no kissing, or even holding hands, let alone sex with someone you’ve just met, or conducting an illicit affair. Our hands are clean, and our behaviour could withstand the scrutiny of the Puritans. “Cleanliness is next to godliness”, we are taught, and we’re doing a great job at the moment.  

One wonders, though, what effect all this sanitisation has on our sanity. The lack of human touch may not only cause depression and weaken our immune system, it can apparently also make us less empathetic. We need to be touched to be touched. The longer the lack of contact continues, the more chance there is that people will start caring less about the ones we’ve been trying to protect with this lockdown. We already see resolve crumbling, people starting to wash their hands of the whole business.

Another side-effect of the lockdown is that life lacks excitement. However, humans have come up with a brilliant scheme to keep the adrenaline flowing. More and more of my sanest friends are falling under the spell of conspiracies. The theories have to become increasingly outlandish to keep the rush going: more fear and outrage are needed to keep the adrenaline-junkies pumped up.

Clean Mind. Source: The Pioneer

In order to keep my own sanity, I have had to clean up my social media accounts. Last week I talked about ‘snoozing’ people, but this week the deluge became so great, I had to stem the tide by unfriending and even blocking some. I have started weaving what I call a ‘web of sanity’ around me, with friends who still retain their critical faculties. So, corona is not just making people sick, it also exposes sick relationships and helps clean them up. ‘Every downside has an upside,’ soccer legend Johan Cruijff used to say.

The fact is, we don’t fare so well in a sterile environment, both mentally and physically. We literally need the microbes on our hands to keep our immune system informed. We need to get our hands dirty, get stuck in with something concrete to do, or we lose our sanity. Hands and minds, the outer and inner world, that’s what it all comes down to now. If we can find a balance, we may be able to clean up our act as a species, and perhaps even cleanse our souls.

  

The Days of Lockdown - a tale of our times. week 2

27 March

Day 12 of lockdown – the art of boredom

This weekend is apparently a crucial one when it comes to the spread of the virus, so Minister Grapperhaus (yes, that’s a name) has implored us to really stay at home the coming days. “Yes, your weekend may be more boring than other times,” he said, “but there are other things you can do, like have a good conversation, read a book, turn on Netflix.” I thought it was interesting that he mentioned these things in that particular order. He, like me, grew up in the days before internet, before mobile phones, before Netflix, and television was something that started at around 6 p.m. and there were only two channels. So, what did we do to entertain ourselves?

Having a good conversation was the first thing Grapperhaus mentioned and that’s exactly what we did. I remember long evenings, sitting around with friends, philosophising about everything we could think of. We would discuss music and deconstruct a certain baseline, or comment on the sound quality of somebody’s loudspeakers. I guess me and my friends were a bunch of pedantic intellectuals, but we sure knew how to pass the time.

Reading loads of books was normal. For my final exam – and this part counted for only 10-15% of my final grade – I had to read 30 books for Dutch, 20 for English, 12 each for French and German and 6 for History. That’s 80 books in about 20 months, about one book a week. It did seem a bit much, but not outrageously so.

There has been one time in my life that I was in true lockdown. When I was around seven, I was locked in my room up in the attic for three days, only allowed out to use the bathroom. I was Rapunzel in her tower, but with hair that was too thin and short and no prince to save me. You might think that I had done something truly horrific to deserve this, but believe me, it is merely a reflection of the insane household I grew up in. So, what did I do to not go crazy? I did a lot of “niksen” (more on which later), I stared out the window, I day-dreamed, but above all, I read. As long as I had my books (which I hid under my pillow, lest they might take them away), I had a whole other world to live in. A big book of fairy tales was my favourite. I have no mementos, toys or trinkets left from those days, except that very book. The three days went by quicker than I expected.

The Dutch concept of “niksen” suddenly came back into vogue when Time Magazine published an article about it last year. Niksen literally means to do nothing, to be idle or doing something without any use or purpose. Pottering about. Eve Ekman from Berkeley University says “the research is strong when it comes to the benefits of slowing down, from emotional perks (like reducing anxiety) to physical advantages, like curtailing the aging process and strengthening the body’s ability to fight off the common cold.”  If “niksen” can help fight the cold, maybe it can also help fight off Covid-19! Allow yourself and your children to be bored. Plenty of studies show that boredom has a wide range of benefits. It sparks our creativity, makes us more inventive and also more altruistic. These are the characteristics we would like our kids to develop, aren’t they?

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Of course, there’s always Netflix. But might it not be nice to step away from consumerism for a change and allow ourselves to just be? So, I wish you all a pleasant weekend full of “lekker niksen”! The rat-race will resume soon enough.  

The Days of Lockdown - a tale of our times

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