Ashfaq Wani
To-Do List, Schedule, Forecast, Deadline. Man is always a planner. Before the coronavirus set its foot on our planet, we run every day, without falling back from our schedule to meet a terrible deadline, to stay ahead of the curve. We always strived and made progress in that rat race. And now as a precautionary measure against COVID19, various governments have implemented lockdown across the globe, and as we know, life has stopped.
Many of us are locked up in our homes, and we have been accustomed to our families. Even when we were away from home for work or study, the sympathetic busyness that surrounded our lives suddenly stopped. There are no Monday morning scrambles, no traffic snarls, and no loud honks. Life suddenly takes away its inevitability and we are exposed to its prerequisites. We need to cook, clean, eat, and sleep. The lucky ones who work online are staring at the screen. We try to engage our children online and offline. The new-casual we are trying to handle is disturbing and turbulent yet proving productive through a lot of other ways.
Uncomforting as we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow. Despite epidemiologists, global health professionals and policy-winning models, no one knows when we will wake up to calamity. Even though most of us are at home, the very familiarity of our environment increases our discomfort and anxiety. We don’t know our new routine. Obviously, for humans, living with uncertainty is harder than living with pain. According to author and psychiatrist, Brian Robinson, participants in an experiment who were told they would definitely receive a painful electric shock were calmer than those who were told that they had a 50% chance of receiving one. Robinson argues, our brains are wired to connect insecurity with danger.
However, despite the discomfort and underlying anxiety, the unknown, but much needed, calmness expands the air. As the quotidian cacophony of urban life has been put to mute, we hear more birds chattering. The air is transparently cleaner. Our life is less painful. It feels like hitting the Stop button on Nature Earth. Perhaps, during this long, but much-needed break, we, as humans, need to review, reflect, re-examine and reset our course of actions.
While we are all doing with less now, do we just need to absorb as much as we unthinkingly did? Regardless of our carbon footprint, with wings on its feet, we travel the world for business or pleasure. We shuttle to work, cursing nonstop traffic jams, but we do not accept our contribution towards them. Since most of us find simple ways to work from home, do we all need to get out of the moment the lockdown is lifted?
Even those with double incomes now have to spend more with children. Does the world need us to stand up as a united family unit? Previously, even though we lived highly networked and connected lives, our relationships were often superficial. While social media helps us stay in touch during this humanitarian crisis, the social distances that are enforced can arouse the strength of our relationships with the people we are familiar with.
Sure, these are uncertain times. Although we hope the outbreak of the coronavirus is arrested in its tracks, perhaps, later on, we should not return to our old ways of life on auto-pilot. Perhaps, by destabilizing us, nature allows us to correct ourselves and we should be more heedful to that.
