Una Mullally: Let’s not rush to forget these lockdown days

For many, Mondays now mark the beginning of another week in limbo. Hints of normal interactions have begun to creep in. We can see some of our friends and family members. A smattering of shops have opened. Car traffic has increased. Our worlds have widened from two kilometres to five kilometres.

I think a lot of people are experiencing echoes from childhood. Some of that is to do with the weather, and how we recall childhood summers as warm and endless. Some of it has to do with sound, and how the noises being carried through neighbourhoods are those of play and neighbours chatting. Some of it has to do with the activities we amuse ourselves with now given how limited our options are: simple pleasures of cooking, kicking a ball, walking, cycling, board games, jigsaws and drawing.

For all the trauma and severity of the situation, many people find themselves talking to friends or family members even more than usual

Many have returned to writing diaries for the first time in years. Many, having filled up their days so readily in the recent past, are now loosening those timetables – or they have been loosened for them – and find themselves languishing in parks for hours, calling around to friends’ houses, sitting in a garden or on a balcony or on the street.

Liberated from work and the obligations of daily life, there is a sense of air and space. The feeling of not having responsibilities is also a childhood echo. For all the trauma and severity of the situation, many people find themselves talking to friends or family members even more than usual, and connecting with people they haven’t spoken to in a while. Many of us are savouring things that we previously rushed past, or didn’t even realise we were missing. The slowdown very obviously connects us to nature, purely by offering us the space to notice things, with lower air pollution creating an added clarity. The colours of flowers seem more remarkable, the mountains more majestic, the trees more beautiful, the animals more fascinating, the water more calming. Is this the case? Or has time just opened up to allow us the space to appreciate things more?

Una Mullally: Young people will rebuild Ireland from ashes

---

Una Mullally: Reverse return of the car to Phoenix Park as a matter of urgency

---

Una Mullally: Students fear failure, but the Department of Education has openly embraced it

---

Una Mullally: The idea of physical distancing in pubs is an absolute nonsense

---

In Jenny Offill’s recent book, Weather, the main character thinks, “When electricity was first introduced to homes, there were letters to the newspapers about how it would undermine family togetherness. Now there would be no need to gather around a shared hearth, people fretted. In 1903, a famous psychologist worried that young people would lose their connection to dusk and its contemplative moments. Ha ha ha! (Except, when was the last time I stood still because it was dusk?)”

Liberated

Many of us have harboured secret and not-so-secret desires to slow down, to be liberated from stress, to radically change our lives, even to run away. In order to cope with how we internalise the relentless rhythm of capitalism, entire ecosystems have sprung up to alleviate the trauma it inflicts on us. We take holidays to remove ourselves from our contexts, and we really enjoy holidays, and then we’re sad when they’re over. We buy tickets to festivals because they offer a sense of escape and the freedom of a suspended “reality”.

The realisations we're having about the positive sides of lockdown are almost all to do with time

We dip into self-help, yoga, mindfulness, therapy, new age spiritualism, strict diets, intense exercise, wellness culture, while failing to realise that many of these things have also been commodified by our rat-race culture, and offer reprieves rather than solutions. We may have to begin to acknowledge that latching on to coping mechanisms that make us better able to deal under extreme pressure and stress is just another way of upholding the systems we should be seeking to break. People have to run, stretch, meditate, just so they don’t melt down under the pressures of work. Anxiety is rampant. The previous pandemic was burnout. Technology, which was apparently meant to free us in multiple ways, particularly in the workplace, has instead filled minutes and hours with more unnecessary tasks, and further drains our attention. People are addled, and many are addicted to scrolling the lives of others and broadcasting themselves.

Upended

So why does lockdown offer solutions that feel calmer even within what surely should be a much more heightened atmosphere – a pandemic that is killing people – than what we existed within previously? The realisations we’re having about the positive sides of lockdown are almost all to do with time. The schedule of our daily lives has been upended. For some, this applies more pressure, such as childcare. For others, it has liberated them from the yoke of commuting, a regular working day, and other obligations. Within this newly formatted day, time plays tricks. Days and weeks compress and contract and all of a sudden it’s June.

The drive to get “back to normal” is an impulse to ignore what’s happening now, because ultimately such realisations disrupt the economic systems we’re told are progressive and healthy, but are in fact regressive and toxic. Before the lockdown learnings get commodified too – in the calm voiceovers of ads for more stuff, in a political culture that calls on a collective spirit yet is rooted in individualism – write down what you’ve learned, and hold on to it before it evaporates, before the memories and lessons become as opaque as those childhood summers.