Reflection: Nothing will ever be the same again - Dinner Table Digest № 3, March 22, 2020
The Dinner Table Digest is a (bi)weekly collection of interesting material from around the internet, curated by Peter Thurley
While I don’t want to add to the panic and alarmism out there, I do see many ways in which recent social distancing precautions are simply not being taken seriously. The reality is that our lives have changed, forever. After the first link, I offer some of my thoughts based on my own life-altering health experience.
We’re not going back to normal - Gideon Litchfield - MIT Technology Review
"We don’t know exactly what this new future looks like, of course. But one can imagine a world in which, to get on a flight, perhaps you’ll have to be signed up to a service that tracks your movements via your phone. The airline wouldn’t be able to see where you’d gone, but it would get an alert if you’d been close to known infected people or disease hot spots. There’d be similar requirements at the entrance to large venues, government buildings, or public transport hubs. There would be temperature scanners everywhere, and your workplace might demand you wear a monitor that tracks your temperature or other vital signs. Where nightclubs ask for proof of age, in future they might ask for proof of immunity—an identity card or some kind of digital verification via your phone, showing you’ve already recovered from or been vaccinated against the latest virus strains."
My thoughts:
One of the hardest things about my health crisis in 2015 is (because it is an ongoing process) the realization that nothing about my life will ever be the same again. In a matter of 3 months, I went from being employed in a senior management role at a local not-for-profit to being unable to do much of anything at all. Five years on, I still have to manage my pain every day – I have serious and significant abdominal pain throughout the day, pain I have to think about and plan for, in ways that I never would have considered before. I went from working with other people to simply staying at home, taking care of myself. I went from moderately successful for a young man in his early 30’s to a couch bound invalid whose only income is the small monthly CPP– Disability stipend of less than $1000. My wife and I went from being a two-income family to a one income family, with my wife doing nearly all the wage earning. The stress getting to her, my wife eventually had to leave one of her jobs so that she could focus on being ‘all-there’ when she was at work. Now she is in a good and stable place with a great employer, but the wages are not quite enough to cover the household costs of two adults, so we increasingly rely on the generosity of our community, our friends and our family. Five years ago, the rhythms of our lives changed in innumerable ways; truthfully, it’s only been in the last 6 months or so that I have begun to accept that I may not work again, despite all of my internal belief systems being oriented towards the protestant work ethic.
Five years later, I’m no longer shocked by my experience, but I’m definitely not ‘used to it.’ My life changed in a very significant way, and while I have come to accept that reality, I often wish that I could go back to a healthier time. But I can’t – I have to make do with what is in front of me.
One of the results of this thinking is that I live my life much more presently than I did before. I’m not as worried about the future as I was before – I can’t be, because my day to day concerns, like making sure I take my pills and eat my breakfast, take priority over the big dreams for the future. It may not always be this way, but for now, I just have to focus on what is ahead of me. I believe this will be society’s experience over the next while. There is no such thing as returning to normal, as going back to how it was. When there is a traumatic event of any kind, that trauma always changes us, it always makes think and act differently, in both positive and negative ways. It’s unlikely that we’ll be able to give our friends hugs for the foreseeable future – and that sucks, because humans need physical touch. Or our shopping experiences may be even more online based than they are now, putting many brick and mortar stores out of business. This will have life-changing effects on families, on moms and dads who now have to figure out homeschooling on top of working from home and doing the housework. People who are already living in precarious situations will inevitably be worse off than those who have lots of material wealth. Our lives will have to change, and we will have to adapt. If we don’t, we’ll get sick or worse, and no one wants that.
Five years from now we’ll look back at an event that changed our lives with a little bit more perspective. We’ll be able to see COVID19 and all its social, political and economic effects, and we’ll understand a bit more about where we went wrong in our decision making and how we can live better. But no matter what, the life we had before COVID19 – that’s gone, and we will have to find a way to together grieve that loss.
Hank Green, of Vlogbrothers fame, shares his story of finding a ‘new normal.’
Feeling overwhelmed? How art can help in an emergency - Olivia Laing - The Guardian
In contrast to the above doom-and-gloom, I found this wonderful piece in The Guardian that talks about the life-giving elements of art. Over the past couple of years I’ve begun to have an art renaissance, if you will, taking a greater interest in art. I hope you’ll allow yourself the time to explore the art world over the next while, in whatever form it may be.
"During this febrile period, I’ve found myself longing for a different kind of timeframe, in which it would be possible both to feel and to think, to process the intense impact of the news and perhaps even to imagine other ways of being. The stopped time of a painting, say, or the dilations of the novel, in which it is possible to see patterns and consequences that are otherwise invisible. Art has begun to feel not like a respite or an escape, but a formidable tool for gaining perspective on what are increasingly troubled times."
Disease as Political Metaphor - Susan Sontag, February 23, 1978 - New York Review of Books
This piece came across my desk today, posted in my favourite subreddit Longreads, and I thought it was a fantastic piece, obviously surfaced as a result of the current focus on disease and illness. Sontag is a brilliant writer, and she pulls her examples of disease as political metaphor from throughout English and French Literature. What does it really mean when we talk about “The fight against cancer?”
"But how to be morally severe in the late twentieth century? How, when there is so much to be severe about; how, when we have a sense of “evil” but no longer the religious or philosophical language to talk intelligently about evil. Trying to comprehend “radical” or “absolute” evil, we search for adequate metaphors. But the modern disease metaphors are all cheap shots. The people who have the real disease are also hardly helped by hearing their disease’s name constantly being dropped as the very epitome of evil. Only in the most limited sense is any historical event or problem like an illness. And the cancer metaphor is particularly crass. It is invariably a call to simplification—always to be resisted. And it is, in most cases, a justification of fanaticism, of harsh measures, including, usually, violence."
Let me know what kind of stories you’d like to see in these Dinner Table Digests - these are as much for you as they are for me!
If you like what you read, PLEASE SHARE WIDELY :)
