Back to Normal
Over the next two weeks, the school term will start. That means the end of the summer holidays in my household - my son will start a new school, my daughter will go up a year in the same school, and my wife will be going to work again. (Three schools, three different start dates...) And that means that I won't be the only person in my house who has some sort of structure to their day - even if that 'structure' means I have to go downstairs to my desk in the morning, and then try to get away from my desk again in the evening.
So, I will be - mostly - at home, at my desk, working from home on my own. My office will also be re-opening over the next two weeks, and although I am looking forward to going in, its not going to be my 'default' in the way that before March, I would go into the office unless I had a particularly good reason not to. And I'm not expecting that to change much until 2021 at the earliest.
In other words, its become pretty clear to me that this (#gestures vaguely around#) is something that we can call "normal" now. No, we haven't gone "back to normal", whatever that might mean (I don't think it really means anything in this context, other than the fantasy of a world without SARS-CoV-2 and all that it entails... which is basically everything that has happened in the last 6 months or so...) But I think we can say that, whatever this (#gestures again#) is, is "normal" now.
Like pretty much everything else right now, that seems pretty weird. But I guess thats the point - normal is weird now. Weird is normal. It is what it is...
Is that necessarily a bad thing though?
Back on the 23rd March, I wrote in the morning;
Right now, our society is undergoing a seismic shift - millions of people are suddenly living and working in a totally different routine, much of which is enabled by the internet and online services - meaning I've got way too many things to be thinking and writing about to actually write any of them down.
So, this is a "for now" post while I try to get my head around what comes next.
Well, I'm still trying to get my head around what comes next. It has been keeping me busy...
That evening, Boris Johnson announced lockdown restrictions, effective as of that evening; the opening of a pair of brackets that,
three four five1
months later, we are still waiting to close.
Those
three four five months have been something of a roller coaster. Except a weird roller-coaster where everyone is on a different ride, nobody really knows what ride everyone else is on, and… Maybe a roller coaster isn't a great analogy here.
Its been weird.
As someone at Buzzfeed smartly observed back in March, the really disorientating thing about all this (#waving furiously#) is that you can't really compare it to anything. We don't have a "last time we had a national quarantine" to compare it to, because the last one was over a hundred years ago and things are totally different now. Pretty much every nation has had a 2020 lockdown of some description, but you can't really compare lockdown in the UK to the experiences in other countries. I can't even compare my own lockdown experience to the guy a couple of doors down who has a roughly identical house with a roughly identical family structure, because he has been furloughed and totally re-landscaped his garden while I was having one of the busiest chunks of time of my life - or the family over the road who had to totally self-isolate because one of them has had treatment for cancer while I was merrily trotting off to the supermarket or my parents' garden, or with someone living alone, or someone with a family of a similar size/age but living in a flat in London (like we did until shortly after our second child was born.) Etc. etc. etc.
I was going to continue with the theme of the 'pair of brackets that we are still waiting to close' and leave this post hanging without a conclusion (which, apart from being much easier to write, seems more appropriate somehow…) But instead, I'm going to conclude with the thing I've been holding on to since some point in late February/early March;
For all of us to get through all of this (#idly waves#) and come out of the other side into a 'normal' that we actually want to call 'normal' needs a fundamental shift in thinking - its not about "me" (how do I avoid catching the virus?), and its not about "us and them" (however you want to make that divide - but generally, its going to be about how do 'we' avoid catching the virus off of 'them'...) - its about all of us together, doing whats best for all of us, together. That means - as long as the virus is out there, and its highly infectious, and you can carry it without knowing about it - behaving as though you're carrying it. The best way to get to a point where nobody has it is for everyone to act as though they have it. If we - as in, all of humanity - can learn to think and act in the interests of all of humanity - then I think it will put us in a good place.
Then we can start to figure out what we want 'normal' to look like. Because it really isn't... you know.
#This#
-
As you can see, this post has been in some kind of draft form for quite a while now... ↩