The lockdown is a dark time, where we are forcibly strapped down to our homes and staying indoors is the norm. Then suddenly,through the darkness, the inner eye begins to see. Our well ordered, predictable life we had come to take utterly for granted has been rudely overturned like an explosion detonated by a terrorist. However, in this case, no one was untouched. Businesses have been lost, loved ones separated. I cannot go to my sisters daughter’s wedding even though my Australian visa and tickets on Malaysian Airlines have come — the lockdown began just as they arrived and shockingly so did the shut down of airports and skies. Even worse was that every country and state shut its borders and businesses and jobs began to fail. That’s the cruellest thing about Covid. They said, ‘We’re all in this together,’ but, too often, we have all been in this apart.
And yet, as the empty streets start to stir with life again, as shops lift their shutters and we emerge blinking from our musty lockdown lairs, there is a keen sense that the darkness glimmered with silver linings. In the rush to return to normal, we must carefully consider which parts of normal are worth rushing back to. The world may never be quite the same again and if we make wise choices, that could be a good thing. An economic system that bought in so greedily to globalisation and cheap labour in far-flung places, must now reflect on the wisdom of relying on different parts of the world and not on ourselves.
Well, the worst did happen, when Wuhan, a city we’d never even heard of, unleashed a pandemic on the world. As a direct consequence it was a brutal wake-up call. Now, our whole attitude to consumerism has changed. Psychologists reckon it takes 21 days to create a new habit. Well, lockdown afforded us that time. Unable to ‘just pop to the supermarket’ or to secure the self-isolation Holy Grail, we learnt how to shop less often.
Millions have begun to use local greengrocers and butchers and kirana shops have become fashionable again. I came to rely on two online outlets for our meats and our vegetables / groceries through the lock down. And, at long last, we had time to look inside those recipe books we’ve been giving each other every Christmas for 20 years! Weaned off the ready meals and posh pizzas, we discovered it was possible to eat better than before and for a third of my weekly grocery spend. With so many small businesses facing ruin, there was a real sense of satisfaction, as well as a patriotic duty, in buying grapes or mangoes from a farmer with a name and a family rather than a faceless brand. Plenty of us have broken the habit; we are never going back to the old, heedless, pile-the-trolley-high way of shopping.
For our family, expenditure for the whole lockdown period reads something like this: New clothes: 0; Eating out: 0; Personal maintenance: 0; Leisure and entertainment: 0. Food: approx 20k. There’s nothing like a pandemic to teach you what’s truly important (and what isn’t). Food, shelter and love are pretty much all we need. Then comes music, singing, sewing, crayonning, crafting, cooking, painting rainbows, imagining, volunteering, pets, neighbourliness, exercise, games and gardening.
All the subjects that are most undervalued by our education system turned out to be precisely the things that nourished us during a bleak time. There’s a lesson there for school principals if they’re smart enough to learn it.
Although the coronavirus is not mentioned by name in the Bible, some Christians have claimed online there are prophetic passages and messages that can be linked to the pandemic. A commonly mentioned passage is Matthew 24.
The scripture reads: “For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in diverse places.
“All these are the beginnings of sorrows.” The passage is attributed to Jesus Christ who told his followers what to expect before his second coming.
It has been hard to stay away from church the whole of Easter Week and every Sunday too, but we have learned to watch Mass online and accept the new way of prayer.
Lockdown also caused an upending of traditional social hierarchies. Celebrities have never appeared more vacuous or irrelevant. It was real scientists, including that gentle, lofty brainbox, chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty, who were our stars now as well as the remarkable, chart-topping figure of Colonel Tom Moore. A youth-obsessed society rediscovered old people; not just as sad casualties of corona but as individuals of spirit and resourcefulness who could bring almost a century of perspective to our present problems.
When this is over will we return to worshipping at the tawdry altar of Fame or will the appreciation of human beings of genuine merit survive reentry to Planet Normal? It feels, at least for now, as if the specific gravity of the carers and the healers will continue to carry great weight. Public gratitude will reshape politics for a generation. It wasn’t just doctors who were learning on the job. Companies that stayed open had to rapidly develop new ways of operating. Staff meetings were held on Zoom or Skype. For years, people who campaigned for better work-life balance were told that the old command-and-control model of major corporations would never accept mums and dads working from home in any numbers.
The culture of ‘presenteeism’ was stubbornly immovable. Well, Covid-19 smashed through the roadblock. During lockdown, WFH (working from home) instantly became the norm, with husbands and wives divvying up the chores. Gender equality acquired rocket boosters. No longer would men be able to claim that the world would end if they had to do their share of their childcare. Acknowledging the huge cultural shift, Jes Staley, the chief executive of Barclays, said that having thousands of workers in one building ‘may be a thing of the past’.
But the downside too was present with everyone at home. The lockdown saw a tragic spike in domestic violence although, more generally, there was a happy strengthening of the family unit. Parents actually got to spend time with their children. Not the snatched, shouty time that makes up so much of stressed-out, double-shift family life, but acres of relaxed interaction. It was like Christmas without the stress of presents. WFH is here to stay as we build an economy and a society that is more responsive to human needs.
The enforced respite from business had other benefits. What was that unfamiliar noise our ears strained to hear? It was the sound of silence. In the deep hush of a car-less world, we could actually enjoy the piercing sweetness of birdsong. No longer permanently distracted, we were experiencing the changing seasons for the first time. The weather gods mocked Covid by blessing us with fabulous weather. This was spring as it was experienced by our great-grandparents, insanely beautiful in its green awakening. The blossom had never been blossomier. No one could remember the sky being that perfectly blue. With aircraft grounded there was no pollution and dirty ‘plane trails to spoil it.
As normal activity shut down, wildlife was emboldened. Peacocks spread their tails and peahens foraged right on main roads in Delhi. Rare Civet cats were seen in Gudalur or Coorg. Tigers walked around the Nagahole jungles and Bison came into tea gardens and were spotted grazing. The levels of nitrogen dioxide over cities dropped sharply, allowing children with asthma to breathe more easily.
Having enjoyed the peace and the fresh fresh air, will we become better custodians of the Earth? In the short term, it’s more likely that urgent economic considerations will drive us back to our noisy, filthy ways. And yet there will be a heightened awareness of the natural world that will make us more reluctant to treat this blessed plot as a rubbish dump. We liked hearing the birds sing.
Of all the silver linings in this surreal, scary period, what will shine brightest in the memory is the expansion of human kindness. An increasingly atomised society, in which people could barely tell you their neighbour’s name, began pulling together in the most extraordinary way. Social distancing spawned a passionate hunger for connection. Abrupt text messages gave way to long phone calls as we checked in on old friends and family. A million bridges were built over the generation gap, with one study finding that young people had contacted the old more during the past six weeks than they would in an average year. Grandchildren helped grandparents conquer their fear of Zoom and WhatsApp. Some 61 per cent of elderly people said they ‘felt more loved and cared for by their relatives since lockdown began’.
Were we ashamed that we had been too busy to pay attention? Yes, undoubtedly shame was part of it, now, the prospect of loss, the remorseless roll call of death on the evening news, lent an urgency to making things right. Covid-19 could kill the weakest and most vulnerable among us, but we would fight back with all the humanity we could muster. Homelessness, it seemed, could be fixed if only people cared enough. When the apocalypse came calling, we answered with altruism.
Many years from now, when we look back on the Lock Down, we may recall how being forced to keep our distance brought us closer together. I think of a small child being held up to kiss her grandmother (my relative) through the glass of her window. I think of a husband in the UK hiring a forklift truck to deliver 50th anniversary flowers to his dying wife on the top floor of a hospital. The poet and us writers are right. Covid came and went. What survived in us was love.
Dr Marianne Furtado de Nazareth,
Former Asst. Editor, The Deccan Herald, &
Adjunct faculty St. Joseph’s College of Arts and Science, Bangalore.