How Can We Learn From The Quarantine?
I guess this is probably the best time to say: Change is the only constant. The recent pandemic has caused many of us to slow down our pace of life. By the sudden turn of events, we’re doing some of our favourite activities that we’ve neglected for years. For some of us, we actually start to think. No matter what happens, whether it is a crisis or a catatrosphe, our experience of time always goes in one direction. It may seem slow, but time still flows. Given that nothing is ever going to be the same and that backwards isn’t an option (which also means that we’re never going back to Normal), our only choice is forward. By now, we ought to realise that institutions and individuals like us hardly change until we realise we ought to. We tend to only change when we’re forced to, often by times when we can clearly envision our well-informed horror materializing sooner than we expect them to.
Some of us have been in denial for a long time, maybe this is a good wake-up call.
Not only has the change made some of us realised the wastage of the equivalent of 20 days a year sweating in rush-hour traffic, the change also informed us how much we’ve disregarded our personal lives. It isn’t just about our work or our resume. We come to realise that we actually care a lot for real genuine connection with friends, family and ourselves. We come to realise that all of us are on borrowed time. There are no refunds and no guarantees. As much as we try to use our time to predict the future and worry about it, we’re often wrong. Furthermore, we are inclined to spend the rest of our days hoping we were right or worried that we weren’t. We try to control the future by telekinesis and anxiety in equal measure. Laughable and frankly, very human of us, I know. Let’s try our best, and let the future take care of itself. At its core, the obvious question is whether, after the present crises end, as they eventually will, will we retain any of these lessons or try to pretend none of this ever happened?
What if the Normal sucked?
A vacation, much like a revolution, always seem far fetched until suddenly it is happening, and at times sooner than anyone thought, because that is when it usually happens. A meticulously planned trip is ideal, but there is only one tiny problem. It almost never happens. An impromptu trip, on the other hand, appears to be the right push for some of us. Much like an impromptu trip, many of our loved activities (which appear useless at first glance but very much needed and fulfilling after completion) have often been ignored, second-guessed and silenced. One reason is due to the fact that many of us do not have time. We know what is ideal, especially for our personal life, but we’re constantly busy. We’re tired. We have work. We have school. Some of us have both and the list goes on. In our downtime, we simply numb ourselves with an episode or two of How I Met Your Mother (HIMYM) or drink a couple of happy hour margaritas. We’re frantic, distracted and exhausted.
Now that our schedule is freed up, we’ve got the time to think and finally act.
Perhaps quarantine gave us all some time to get off the nonstop frenzied hamster wheels of capitalism and think. We live in this state of doublethink, seeing and living in two worlds superimposed over one another, the one it is and the one it was supposed to be. Some of us live in an unshared objective reality where we want to tell ourselves that we see the objective truth before the others. Challenging the status quo is our go-to. Others, often the artist, the poet or the offbeat person, tend to live an unshared cultural reality than the rest of us. Romanticization is their weapon. For most people, these two worlds overlap and for some, the ideal eclipses the actual.
Whether it is one, the other or a mixture of both, especially after this quarantine, it is important that we do not confuse these two ideology. It is like when we’ve been abroad for some time and experience a culture shock there and subsequently, coming home. We learn a couple of things there, a couple of things about ourselves there and we try to incorporate different elements into what we know is the best form of life for us here. The truth is, it doesn’t matter where we’re physically at or at which point of life we’re in, we simply need to pay closer attention to who we are by spending time with ourselves. I believe this is the period, post-normal if I may, when we re-discover ourselves for who and what we truly care about.
