Taking stock of our lives: a silver lining in the lockdown

Well this feels like the great reckoning. Of how we live now. And of how we change the way we live whenever we emerge blinking into the sunlight of a recovered world. It’s a vast reset and we will come out of it, I’m sure, with a humbling sense of gratitude. For so much. So many simple, beautiful joys denied us now. Which is no bad thing. Things will change after this and for the better; the universe is telling us to change.

We’ve been on a march of relentless upscaling for so long now, in our time of untrammelled prosperity and peace. It’s been all about bigger consumption, bigger greed, bigger indulgence, further travel and wider outsourcing of cooking, of cleaning and family requirements. Now is the moment for downscaling and it feels like a vast and replenishing corrective. There’s some medicine to all this change; the balming of a new, distilled way of being. 2020 feels like a huge slap in the face in terms of how we’ve been living our lives for so long. Jostling, shouty, dashing, exhausted, time-poor, rubbing up against each other so belligerently and competitively and loudly and ungenerously.

I’m enjoying the distinctively old-fashioned tint to the way we’re being forced to live now. Drawn in, quieter, closer to home and family. Six of us are now existing in close quarters under our little tin roof (plus a neighbour’s tent out the back.) It feels like a recalibration of us as a family unit in a healing, nostalgic way. For something felt slightly askew in how we’d slipped into living our lives; it felt like families weren’t meant to be existing like this. Madly rushing about, swamped and stressed; enduring long commutes, dashing off to activity after activity, eating separately, disappearing into our isolated little hives to watch individual screens and working all hours during the week then diving into weekends crammed with extracurricular activities and social engagements where we barely saw each other until Sunday night, and by then were too tired to meaningfully come together as we prepared uniforms and school bags for the slog of another working week ahead of us.

But now, sparseness. Our shrunken world centred around home feels suddenly, oddly… expansive. Creative. Crafty. Quietened and more considerate. It’s as if a blanket has fallen upon the hysteria of modern living, muffling us into a new way of being. We’re existing more communally as a family, more mindful of each other’s space, knowing we have to keep things tidy and more respectful, for each other’s sanity. We have to make this work or we’ll go mad. Once upon a time we lived more selfishly – and my soul feels plumed by this vast recalibration. It’s a gift in an odd way, and I hope I never forget the charged connecting with others that’s embedded in it.

“Strange is our situation here upon earth,” Albert Einstein wrote in Living Philosophies. “Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: That we are here for the sake of others... for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realise how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labours of others, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received.”

To survive this, we need each other. As I write this in the early morning a neighbour has lobbed over our front gate a bundle of croissants freshly purchased from a baker who’s still in business. The joy of connection, of kindness. We can do this. Make this work. Learn from it, change. Yes, there’s a lot to be grateful for in this new way of living, with all its fresh wonders.