Misery loves company, but that doesn’t make it party time

For social beings, social distancing is counterintuitive and keeping away is not something most of us relish. But it’s a rare bit of armour for an immediate future that is still being written.

I am not a party pooper. I do not like this virus any more than you do and I am equally inconvenienced by it. I hate its mayhem and its insidious reach, the deaths and illnesses it has inflicted and the livelihoods it has curtailed.

I hate that it has separated families and friends across state borders and behind locked doors, and I mourn for those who have had to mourn all but alone, denied even the reassurance of human touch because even funerals have been truncated.

So the fact I am not rejoicing at our new freedoms, as though recent months have been an inconvenient blip on the return route to normal, does not make me a cynic. Neither is the distance that I will continue to maintain an over-reaction.

There has been a binary nature to much of this season — some feeling overworked and others underworked; too much free time versus not enough; loving home confinement against the devastating reality of loneliness — and what we’ve endured since summer’s bushfires were tailgated by a global pandemic has said much about us as a nation, but also as individuals and our risk profiles.

Take the 10,000-odd tests conducted in NSW over one 24-hour period this week. They revealed two positive results — and produced as many responses.

“Only two cases out of all those tests,” some declared gleefully, taking this as a sign that their risk of infection was now essentially nil and they could act accordingly, while as many added “that we know of”.

On some things we’ve been more united, encouraged by the recent decline in new cases nationally and the massive uptake in testing whose daily total reveal has become part of our new drill. Many have a fresh appreciation for the freedom of a picnic and are thrilled, more than their pre-coronavirus selves might have imagined, at the imminence of intrastate travel, if hesitant about where or when or even if they should make the first move.

Slowly, blessedly, our newly curtailed lives are becoming slightly less restricted. But after all these weeks inside with so many of our liberties constrained, we are emerging into a new kind of light — one where too many have missed the memo or misread it: packed malls before Mother’s Day, shoppers diving over one another to grab a weekly supermarket special, mates shaking hands at their local takeaway or embracing in the park like it’s still 2019. I’ve even seen a middle-aged man bump into an old friend and gleefully kiss her on both cheeks.

Fatigued? Who isn’t tired of this uncertain new life with its strange new rules? Possibly — probably — you’re also irritated by those many sticklers, friends, shoppers, politicians, passing pedestrians, who keep insisting, as per every governmental and medical advisory, that you stay 1.5m away.

None of us really likes these changes. For social beings, social distancing is counterintuitive and keeping away is not something most of us relish. But it’s a rare bit of armour for an immediate future that is still being written, even as we emerge into late autumn with our population largely intact.

The fact most of us are still here and healthy does not mean, however, that we are on the precipice of returning to the life of 2019, or that social distancing is suddenly optional.

So as we step out into these early days of whatever comes next, and some continue to keep their distance more conscientiously than others, maybe also venturing that none of us will be seeing Europe or dancing together or attending oversized celebrations for a very long time, please do not think of us as pessimists. Just realists.