I wrote this piece for West Franklin Breeze back in 2020. It seemed a timely reminder here at the start of 2022, as rumours abound we’ll be heading for yet another seasonal lockdown. How could we not? After a “free” summer of mixing and mingling?
Lockdown was a time of contrasts for me. Life wasn’t going to be very different; I work from home already, we homeschool our kids already, my parents live next door in the same bubble.
The teddy bears (we tied ours onto the gate because windows can’t be seen from the street), the Zoom calls (regular homeschool socialising went virtual), the friendly challenges between the two head chefs in the two kitchens of our dual household (the whole family’s satisfied tummies the happy outcome of their creativity)… these were positive things.
The slowing down of it all; I learned, with surprise, that the anxiety I feel around my to-do lists was not, as I had always thought, a result of external factors, but rather exists inside me, inside a busy mind programmed to believe ticks on the list equal daily achievement.
It was a blessing to gain a tangible awareness that stillness, walking, yoga, preparedness and relishing moments of love and laughter and connection can counter-weight that anxiety. (In lockdown, they could even make it vanish, in a puff of birdsong.)
Then, as weeks wore on and I’d barely ventured further than our street, as the gloss wore off the Zooms and the comfort of the bubble started to feel like a second skin I was reluctant to shed, I started to ask questions.
Why could I buy hard liquor online, but not naturopathic supplements?
Why could I get fast food but not osteopathic treatment?
Why was our ‘essential’ world going around thanks largely to the toil of workers at the bottom end of the pay scale, while others enjoyed an extended paid holiday?
When the many thousands of predicted fatalities didn’t happen, when they were not even hundreds, barely even tens… why, in fact, were we at home at all?
As the children grew restless, I despaired of the situation through their eyes. The monsters aren’t under the bed, but they are shaped like COVID-19 and they’re lurking in wait for you on an un-sanitised door handle or in a friend’s misdirected sneeze.
What will be the impact on our young people, to live through this unprecedented uncertainty just when they need certainty the most? The world has changed now.
I thought of Neal Donald Walsche, who wrote there are only two true emotions: love, and fear. So what if we stopped the world because of love, instead of fear?
What if we shut down and stayed home until inequality and injustice was a thing of the past? Until every woman, man and child was loved the way they deserve to be loved, loved enough to break cycles of violence, corruption and hate, so that when we re-opened the world, it was one where loving kindness for each other would be as natural as breathing?
A world holding its breath for love.
It wouldn’t be a crisis. It would be a miracle.
Zigzag Utopia 