Life in lockdown

As Covid-19 surged across the world in February this year and countries hurtled towards imposing lockdowns as a preferred course of action, knowing no other way to respond to a pandemic of such ferocity, the world was confronted with a daunting challenge of how to live it out. There was a deep and heightened sense of anxiety generated by the unpredictable nature of a major global health disruption.

What added to people’s woes and rampant restlessness was the fear of the unknown as governments went into action mode to understand the peculiar dynamics of the scourge and cobble up strategies to slow down the spread of the virus and save as many lives as they could.

In the absence of global cooperation on how to cope with the gravest health challenge with countries such as the United States and China using Covid-19 as an opportunity to paint each other in a bad light, people had reasons to be worried.

The disarray in the scientific community grappling with the task of suggesting a set of agreed-upon strategies to mitigate the risk of infections and consequently casualties was only complemented by the inadequacy of decision-makers and politicians to understand the gravity of the situation and step up efforts to weave a common narrative.

While the public health systems were overwhelmed, the economic costs of the lockdowns were evaluated and some kind of counter-strategies were deployed, people living within the four walls of their houses, unaccustomed to this kind of ‘solitary’ life, struggled to come to terms with what has been described as a new normal.

The experience of living under lockdown has exposed some serious fault lines in the way we have organised our life. The past few months challenged us and our notions of work-life balance in ways we never imagined. Psychiatrists reported a wider incidence of domestic violence and prevalence of acute depression that led to a higher rate of divorces and even suicides, reflecting the low priority we afford to mental health.

It is a pity that we have not been able to normalise conversations on psychological health, which is as central to our overall well-being as physical health.

Covid-19 exposed the unreliability of the material advancement that humankind takes immense pride in. The takeaway from the ravages of the scourge is that the world remains vulnerable and before the forces of nature. In a single swoop, the pandemic inflicted an economic loss of trillions of dollars (though the exact losses have yet to be documented) and pushed countries back by a decade if not more.

Covid-19 served as an equaliser by outlining the shared challenges facing humanity, no matter the differing levels of progress achieved by the international community. The post-Covid period must pave the way for a sober reflection of our notions of ‘development’ and ‘progress’. The capitalism-led and consumerism-based economic model was found to be lacking in spirit and ethos to rise to the challenge posed by the pandemic.

In more familiar social settings, individuals and families sought to deal with what they described as boredom, not knowing what to do with loads of free time courtesy the lockdown. The easily available free access to technological gadgets and facilities failed to mitigate the deep-rooted feelings of being bored.

The situation reflected a greater malaise facing our generation -- an inability to cope with aloneness and enjoy rich dividends of introspection and wisdom that it affords. Artist Agnes Martin wrote in the twilight of her life, “The best things in life happen to you when you are alone.”

Making a case for ‘fertile solitude’ as a raison d’etre of a content life, poet Elizabeth Bishop recommended that people should have at least one period of prolonged solitude to be able to listen to what Wendell Berry termed as ‘one’s inner voices’ that become more audible, enabling people to respond to their lives.

The state of restlessness and psychological upheavals that mark our life in the contemporary times represent the failure of our educational system and social code that does not prepare us for a life of happiness and contentment. Our ideas of happiness are often described in terms of material achievements, higher paychecks, better academic grades and shiny careers.

Little wonder then that we happily pass on this ‘burden of expectations’ to our children. The older generation can clearly be faulted for paying little to no attention to the training of our children’s imagination, imparting social skills to them, and teaching them the art of being alone, at peace with oneself and the world around us. We often confuse and conflict the notion of happiness with entertainment and pleasure.

As our struggles to fight the predicament of our existence during the lockdown sufficiently established, our generation has lost the sense of wonder associated with book reading. Our children may be cracking academic records and getting accepted in the top-ranked universities, but there are serious concerns on their ability to generate enthusiasm for imagination and happiness grounded in a state of mind that revels in unpacking the secrets of life.

By any stretch of imagination, our generation is a bored and unhappy one, a fact corroborated by the experience of life in lockdown. We can be tempted to scapegoat information technology for our inadequacies and shortcomings. The fact, however, remains that our obsession with technology is more a symptom of our self-inflicted maladies than the cause of them. The freedom from this form of ‘slavery’ lies in revisiting the infrastructure of our thoughts that have shaped the paradigm to view not only our own life but also the world around us.

As we walk more quickly and willingly into life’s ‘aggressive haste’, we tend to miss out on the manifestations of nature, which are but the fountainheads of pure joy and contentment and the means of enriching our lives. Nature enjoys the advantage of making us take a break from the mundaneness of our existence and transporting us to the world of excitement and heavenly delight.

The poetry of William Wordsworth is a living tribute to nature’s undying power to heal our wounds. The pandemic showed that our relationship with nature has weakened. In our rush to conform to the demands of busyness, we have been deprived of even the awareness of the loss.

Hermann Hesse beautifully highlighted our predicament when he said, “The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.”

The pandemic has imparted a useful lesson to rebuild the very foundation upon which the edifice of our life is raised. Our search for meaning in life will come from the transformation of our thinking infrastructure that forms the core of our being. This is a task that requires investment both from citizens and the state.

The writer, a Chevening scholar, studied International Journalism at the University of Sussex.

Email: amanatchpk@gmail.com

Twitter: @Amanat222