To Be or Not To Be

A little kingdom I possess,
Where thoughts and feelings dwell;
And very hard the task I find
Of governing it well.
~ Louisa May Alcott

...that more or less describes my situation!

~A Wise Man Said~

It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.
~ Aristotle
Sunday, March 29, 2020
 
Normal. I crave for the normal life these days as much as anyone else. I crave to live in a world before the pandemic and for someone to change the direction of events. I wish there was a way to rewind and go back to how we were…

What worries me, especially for the kind of change resistant person that I am, are the predictions of how the post-pandemic world or the post-pandemic us will not be what we were before. There are different ideas about what will change or how it will change but there seems to be no doubt that change it will. In spite of my intense wish that things remain the same, for no other reason than that I fear change, I have to agree. I feel that things will change…

I never really understood how historical events such as world wars changed the world or the people of the world. Even though one read about the war and the descriptions of war that brought about those changes, I don’t think I ever understood at a deeper level. Now when I think about how this pandemic is playing out, I can’t help have an insight into how these changes occur…

I was reading this article which talked about some of the changes that we may expect. One of them was that this pandemic will keep rearing its head through the year, simmering below the surface and erupting in the winter perhaps, so people will need to be on their guard. People will continue to work from home, and work from home instead of being a temporary solution will become the new normal. The fact is that I have been pretty much working from home the past three years, going to the university only when needed to conduct face to face activities like teaching. So, inherently the idea of working from home is neither new nor particularly unattractive to me. But thinking about it as a new normal disturbs me. I can’t quite like the idea that in a post-pandemic world everyone will be working from home, studying from home, attending conferences from home, conducting meetings from home… I can’t quite take to this new normal if it is indeed going to be a new normal. I can’t deny that in some ways this arrangement might be helpful to people but seeing this as some sort of a normal means that the connection with human beings that is anyway being lost by the day would be lost even more. I’m not sure if this would mean more engagement with people at home or less engagement with humans in general. I personally can’t look forward to a prospect where home and work become one world… one could say this would make me more bonded to the home but I think it would be more like being bounded or make home a rather business-like space.

This is just one example of the new normal but I think one can think of many others and whether they are for the good or the bad, time will tell… also perhaps the time that it takes for us to get back to a semblance of normal which at this stage doesn’t seem anytime soon. The one change I expect to see in myself in the new normal is the appreciation of the normal. I have always enjoyed my solitude so what is a forced solitude for many at this time has not really affected me… and nor has it made me more reflective than usual because it was always my normal. But I believe I have not appreciated how precious this normal is… I have never experienced it being taken away suddenly to be doomed to some sort of uncertain condition of life for weeks, months, years… I guess this sudden snatching of normality encourages me to value the normal more … when I look back to this time where doing some of my tame leisure activities like pottering about in the shops is also not possible, I will perhaps breathe a sigh of relief… simply being able to exist without confronting mortality on a daily basis, my own, my family’s, people in the world would make my new normal beautiful…

Though I don’t agree with the prediction that we will all start doing everything online in the new normal world… my sense from what I myself feel is that we will all sorely miss the human connection that we took for granted all this while… that we will want to have more of it and not less…and that our new normal will be about the things that we crave the most now...which is the real and not the virtual…
 

posted by Sylvia D'souza at 4:55 am 0 comments
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