'Wave' Goodbye to the Old Normal

As I write this blog, we're entering into a 2nd covid wave, with a (local) lockdown scheduled for Monday. It's incredibly oppressive. It feels like there's a huge weight on our collective shoulders and, individually, I feel like my life is on hold, waiting for something to change. Admittedly, some of this sense of oppression comes from my personal circumstances. My 'mother-in-law', Marion has, very sadly just died following terminal brain cancer surgery- she was suffering from delirium and was refusing to eat and drink. Whilst, at some level, she wanted to leave us, the shock and impact is still significant for my partner and myself. Our house is not habitable and we are still living in rented accommodation nearly two years on from when we first moved in. I am also trying to lose weight and get fitter, which has been partly successful, but has stalled somewhat. However, it feels also bigger than that, that life has become a little bit smaller and more restrictive for all of us. The normal rules that we use to conceptualise our collective co-existence in mutual space have been binned - we have to think twice about going out, arranging events and seeing relatives and friends. As mentioned elsewhere, my 50th birthday is less than 4 months away and it looks like it's going to be Zoom party :(

I know this is the case for a number of my friends, one of whom postponed his 50th party in June to June 2021 but this now looks as it event this might be in jeopardy as part of the 2nd wave of covid. My sister and her family were coming over from Australia to stay with us but this now looks as if this won't happen. And so on - and on - and on. Having said all of that, I think I need to look inside for resilience, rather than expecting to get this from somewhere or someone else, in order to have the energy to push off this oppressive external context. This has led me to think about the three lives that I lead (have led), within three different structures.

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The first life is the external world and structure that we are all familiar with. Going out to work, going to school, going shopping, going on holidays, going to cafes, restaurants, birthday parties. All of these things have physical, containing aspects to them - buildings, parks, hotels etc. which are reassuringly solid and seemingly immutable. I listened to an interesting podcast the other day between Chris Evans and philosopher Alain de Botton. de Botton is well known for his writing on a number of topics: happiness, sex, marriage, work, architecture. Evans remarked that he'd seen de Botton's work on beautiful houses and remarked on de Botton's view of how important physical structure is to us. de Botton told a story of how someone said that these spaces, including his own, seemed very calm and therefore he must be 'a very calm person'. However, de Botton argued that the opposite was true and he needed the calm space to counter the inner lack of calm with. He also said that he had a friend who was very interested in collecting and displaying very bright and vibrant African style materials and that his immediate reaction was a strong aversion: ' they're too bright'. But he realised that his reaction to them was actually more about him and being confronted with his own turbulent inner world, whereas the friend was becoming slightly bored with their own context and valued the vibrancy of the colours. He argued that the physical structures that we live, work and play in have a similar constructing effect on us. 'Ugly' spaces have the capacity to bring us down, depress us, make us less than we are. However, 'beautiful' structures are reassuring and protect us from what is outside, like the comforting presence of a parent or significant other. This engagement with the external world is significantly constrained by covid- whilst we can still visit these places (for the moment anyway) , the physical artefacts of covid are everywhere - the 2m signs, hand sanitiser dispensers, queues of people with a bewildering variety of masks etc. And indeed, we are constrained as to where we can go, inside these structures - for example, my 5 year old daughter goes to an after school facility that we have NEVER seen the inside of and I have not been inside my youngest daughter's nursery for over 6 months. Even when we are allowed inside toilets, for example, there are urinals and basins that closed off with red and wide barrier tape to prevent us from using them. It currently feels like we'll never be in close, physical and social proximity with anyone ever again.

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The second life is related to the first and is as a consequence of the pandemic. This is my virtual life that I lead via teleconferencing and social media. Clearly, these things were aspects of my life pre-covid. However, they've now taken on a greater emphasis and importance given the restrictions imposed on my first external, physical life. I now attend various meetings via Zoom, or occasionally, Teams or Skype. Rather like with masks in the physical world, I notice that colleagues I interact with are 'constructing' virtual environments, for example, on Zoom using virtual backgrounds of either the University or exotic holiday locations or corporate backdrops. I myself had a brief flirtation with the background environment where, due to the lack of an up-to-date laptop, creating my own 'green screen' using green A4 paper sellotaped together! However, I did this at the time in a slightly tongue in cheek way, using backgrounds such as the old 70's & 80s set of 'Swap Shop' as a background. At the time, I thought little of this choice but there may be some connection with my inner world here (see below). Both masks in the external world and presentation of self in the virtual world have become vehicles for self expression. Verbal expressions such as "You're on mute" have become standard fayre on Zoom calls. An interesting sub-artefact of Zoom has been the use of the Chat function on it within work meetings. Whilst it is often used by 'hosts' to help manage meetings (e.g. 'Put your name in the chat if you want to speak'), it has also enabled a potentially competing and different conversation to take place between meeting participants on the call. Also, with the ability to privately Chat with others, this enabled a virtual version of passing each other notes in physical meetings, without fear of discovery/ sanction by 'the teacher'. The ubiquity of Zoom has also raised questions about relative presence/absence within the virtual world. Given that Zoom allows us the facility to mute ourselves and switch our own video off, it is possible (albeit unwise:)) to attend some work meetings in a state of undress, so to speak! However, the message it gives others potentially is that you are not engaged or that you might not be engaged in the meeting and are 'lurking' rather than participating. This has led to the tacit (though sometimes explicitly stated) expectation that you will have your video on during a meeting. The challenge this presents us with is that we are much more visible to all than we would be in a face to face meeting in the external world. Hence, we have to have our 'game face' on, virtually all of the time. I have known the agony of being made to want to laugh by a private Chat comment or text message but feeling unable to, due to the perceived need to 'be professional'. This feeling leads me to make comparisons between Zoom calls and Jeremy Bentham's notion of a panopticon, where we have the potential to be observed all of time and, due to this, have a tendency to internalise that observation in some way - e.g. being 'professional', being 'interested'.

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The third life - and for me, the most challenging - is the inner life. This is the world inside my own psyche and is about my motivations, feelings, fears and hopes. De Botton, mentioned above, argues that paying attention to this inner world and gaining perspective on our own place in the external world is perhaps the most important task we have at the moment. I find this challenging as I have had a tendency, for much of my life, to see things from an 'outside-in' perspective. By that I mean that I have tended to focus on external factors and other people as being the source of my energy, health and happiness. However, to use a metaphor to explain this, this is rather than being on board a small boat on rough seas - you are then buffeted by the waves of the external context and other peoples' agendas. I have been accustomed to repressing my wants and feelings to the extent to which it is more difficult for me to get in touch with these feelings. I liken this to having real callouses on my feet. Whilst they protect my feet from damage from the rubbing of my shoes, they also render my feet relatively insensitive to sensation in those parts. Similarly, this works with my feelings and wants. On the one hand, having healthy defence mechanisms protect me from psychological damage when my wants or desires are thwarted or frustrated. On the other hand, those same mechanisms inhibit me from being fully conscious of those desires and make it difficult for me to experience them fully. As I've got older, I've become more conscious of this strategy and its limitations and have been working on resolving these issues .However, I still find it difficult, at times, to move away from my dominant orientation of looking outside of myself for resources, particularly when dealing with a challenging context like covid. It's still quite likely that when someone -a partner, friend or colleague - asks me 'what do you want from your life?' or 'what do you want for your children?', the question itself paralyses me. It confronts me with my own frustration with my 'stuckness' in not being able to fully answer such questions that I feel I 'should' be able to answer and enhances a view of myself as powerless, lacking drive and being buffeted by the waves.

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I think that the way through this for me is acknowledge and work with the integration of these three lives. The initial impetus and resource needs to come from the inner world, from which the virtual and external world can be leveraged to support these inner resources and to formalise them into physical and social structures which contain and encourage these inner resources to be realised.