We are hallway through our third week. It is a strange unreality. It is hard to think that you just cannot pop out into your old life – but most of it is not there. Shops are shut, businesses closed.
I ordered my new book Schizoid. I wanted a copy for myself. Normally there is a one day delivery. I was quite shocked to find the delivery date was May 14th. Obviously the book publisher is shut down for five or six weeks. The world has shut down out there! It is not the same. It isn’t just theatres, clubs and cinemas that are shut.
So here I am in my study. Little Richard is blaring out that we’ll Rip It Up. He’s wrong for the moment! Ripping Up will have to wait.
I have finished the rewrite of Farm 703 The Human Project. I am starting on a final read through. That’ll keep me busy.
We went out for our walk down the country lane to the next village and back – about four miles. We passed our village store. People were queuing outside in an orderly line – all spaced out with social distancing. It was a stark reminder.
The lane was empty of traffic. It was a cool day with an overcast sky but no hint of rain – a good day to walk. Without the noise of traffic the hedgerows and trees were alive with birds and birdsong. Everywhere is breaking out in bud. There was even a smattering of May blossom. It was like nature coming back to life.
As I walked along I was looking around at the fields. It was like travelling back to hundreds of years back when this lane would have been a cart track. It was a different pace then. People would have tended the fields, growing corn for bread. They’d have their vegetable patches, fruit trees, chickens and pigs. The pub on Saturday, with maybe a band of locals, and church on Sunday. Maybe the market in town. Life would have been slow. None of this galivanting around.
I don’t suppose it was easy – cold in winter, plenty of disease, some hard work with few luxuries – but it would not have changed for hundreds of years and it would have had its pleasures and community spirit.
Our world would be unrecognisable to them.
Perhaps it will take a virus to get us back to that?
But not this one.
In a few months we’ll come back out and it will all start up again.
For now I’ll wander the lanes and breathe the fresh air, smile as I hear the birds, and I’ll enjoy the moment.
After all – that’s all we have – this moment.
Living in the moment is really all we have all of the time Opher!
We might identify more readily with the past, and succumb to wistful thinking, but certainly nobody knows for sure what the future (now) holds. (I prefer to be optimistic that progressive change is a possibility) That is not to suggest that certain aspects of the past – the mentality of a bygone age – shouldn’t be updated, renewed and assimilated into our contemporary world. For example you mention there being no road-traffic whilst you walked…so, unnecessary road travel – the daily commute to a place of work – is it entirely necessary? The fact that a percentage of the working population are currently working from home raises the question of whether there is an actual need for office based working if we embrace technology in the right way?
COVID-19 has lifted the veil on how the world operates at the, macro and micro level, and the part we play as individuals and as a collective within that ingrained, unchanging, out-of-balance system.
This pandemic is an opportunity to address all that is fundamentally wrong in our world: so perhaps we should choose to positively embrace this chance we have and make choices benefiting and bettering life on Earth for one and all?
DN
As an idealist I would love to think that we might seize the moment to make things right. But I lived through the sixties and saw the optimism crumple, the people drop back in and forget what it was they were fighting for.
My optimism is tinged with doubt.
Making things right is a place for a reckoning to start. Doubt should be built-in, but not to rule the possible out. Just sayin’.
A reckoning is coming Jeff. I can’t believe the Trumpo popularity ratings are rising after the worst display of incompetence I’ve ever witnessed. What is wrong with the American people?
I too am an optimist. This pandemic offers us so many opportunitites to create a better. world. And the momentum out there is demonstrating that.
Let’s hope that that momentum doesn’t get stifled by the ones who do not want change.
The vaunted Neo-libs will rush to fill the vast void CV will leave in its wake. We need to give more money to those poooor oligarchs. We keep hearing how 70-80% of people in the US support this idea or that, but never a nod to it. 70-80% of people will need to get in the streets to be “heard.” As to the whining Trumpists “They wouldn’t listen to us,” they still aren’t and won’t. Back in the steel mills and coal mines, right? LOL Too bad you Trumpist never had anything worth listening to save “Waaaaaaaaaaa, my grandkids won’t be able to work in a coal mine….Waaaaaaaaa.”
They need to work in a wind farm or solar farm. They’d be happier doing that too!