Learning to see again in the age of Corona
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It astounds me how quickly we have adapted to this new life, this new normal. No more opening the front door and striding out onto the street, all casual confidence, secure in our right to go wherever we want, for whatever reason or no real reason, on a whim even. Instead, we stand hesitantly on the doorstep, scanning the paths to see if they are clear, fretting about whether this outing is really essential, hoping we won’t see too many people.
No more walking straight into a shop, lost in thought, reaching for the list in your back pocket, wandering up one aisle and down another, then retracing your steps because you can never remember where they keep the eggs. Now, we wait outside, like human dominoes, or if there is no queue, we pause outside the door and crane our necks to see whether it’s safe to enter, seeking reassurance from the person on door duty. We are newly cautious, uncharacteristically docile, painfully, deliberately patient. It does not sit easily with us, this new obeisance.
No longer do we rise early to wake grumpy teenagers, who groan and turn over and mutter that they ‘hate school’. No more making packed lunches, no more ironing uniforms, no more goodbyes at the door, no more shouting down the street “Have a good day!” They didn’t appreciate the irony then. They certainly wouldn’t now. And anyway, they have nowhere to go.
No more trips to London, or to the beach, or anywhere. No more hugs. No more handshakes. We shake our heads at TV shows from before. Watch them run fecklessly into a shop for a pack of fags! See them huddled together around a tiny table in a crowded pub! Imagine! It’s only been five weeks and yet that life already seems so alien, fraught with danger and careless abandon.
We took our freedoms for granted because we did not recognise them. They were as simple, as rudimentary as the breaths we took every day, without ever thinking about the lungs buried deep in our chests.
The invisible virus has, in a way, made everything else shockingly visible. We finally recognise how good we had things; we appreciate the daily struggle of our bodies just to survive; we see, really see, the cherry blossom falling in the park like snow because we know we will not see it until tomorrow; we see, really see, the people who serve us in our shops, who care for us in our hospitals, the people who collect our rubbish; we wonder if they were always there and how we never thought to see them. We look into their eyes and our ‘thank yous’ are more fervent because we are no longer blind.
We cannot see the virus in the air we breathe but we finally see, really see, our children and our partners. There is nowhere to hide anymore. We are all, as they say, in this together and because there are so few distractions, we really look and we truly see. We see, really see, that our children have grown, that they are beautiful and strong and scared and thoughtful and angry. They see the same in us. We talk more because we have become more visible to each other.
Fear has opened our eyes. In our old lives, back in normal times, we were too busy to remember that death stalks us all. Or to put a kinder spin on it: we forgot that we are here for a good time, not for a long time. Death is not new. Death is always the most unrelenting of constants. But we were too busy — commuting, working, going places, seeing people, taking trips, buying stuff — to remember. Now, we are told death is in the very air we breathe, the air that sustains us. Today, our every move is not driven by the desire to forget but by the need to remember, so that we may slow death’s stride. And perhaps, because of that, we have also remembered how to live.
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We have seen that impossible is but a word, or maybe a state of mind. Shut our schools just before exams? Impossible. Make millions of people work from home? Impossible. Ground the planes? Impossible. Close our shops, our bars, our restaurants? Impossible. Stop the cars and clear the air? Impossible. Stand outside our homes at the same time every week in this land of casual estrangement, clapping with our neighbours, who we finally see, for people we have never met? Impossible. Get into a side plank and lift your leg to the sky for 30 seconds? Impossible.
Our certainties have crumbled in the face of a virus that has exposed our frailty, our weaknesses and our tendency to pay attention to all the wrong things. It has redefined the impossible but by doing so, it has also reshaped the possible. Who knows where we will go from here but what is certain is that our imaginations will stretch further and deeper because the boundaries that once limited our dreams, and our nightmares, have been pulverised.
This is also why we are all so frightened. Nothing is impossible. But maybe today, despite the appalling loss and pain and suffering, despite our anguish at being separated from loved ones, despite all the big and small everyday tediums, we can find some hope in the expansion of the possible.
People say this is the new normal. It is not normal at all. But maybe it is time we found a new way to be normal in a world where the old certainties of our rat-race lives have been radically reshaped, a world where we see, really see, the cherry blossom fall like snow more often.
