Having spent the entire day at home, shifting the mass of my body from one corner of one room to the other corner of the same room, rearranging the arrangement of my bones as I sat on the sofa, first sideway leaning on my left hip, and then sideways leaning on my right hip, and then with my legs crossed up on the sofa, and then my legs extended and propped on the table, and then with one leg neatly folded under the other – still extended and propped on the table in front – and so having mixed and matched the full extent of variations of human anatomy, I sensed the impending verge of insanity staring point blank into the eyes of my mind.
An hour longer, and…
An hour longer, and I…
And I… nothing. Nothing will happen if I continue this same mantra routine even for another ten hours or ten days or ten months, and if I suggest otherwise it means I am being dramatic – just like probably you yourself have been dramatic today if you’ve thought you would lose your mind if you spent a single hour longer confined within the confines of your home.
Yes, this is me calling you out. You… remember, you were complaining today?
We are flustered more by the thought of being restricted than the very act of restricting ourselves. That this current state has been imposed upon us – artificially by our governments, socially by our peers, and naturally by a virus that has made a grand entrance onto the stage of our lives – and is not a construct of our own volition.
It is not even the instance of not having control, but the mere thought of it, that disturbs us.
All of a sudden, all of us are extroverts, yearning to go outside and meet people and do things. We are quick to forget that before this age of social distancing, we would go sit in coffee shops and open our laptops, connected to the WiFi and plugged to the socket, hitting the buttons on our keyboards as we swiped through our Instagram feeds, feeling super-social because six feet away, another person sat next to us and did exactly the same thing, looking the same direction as I was: into the glowing blue screen of social disconnectivity.
You were six feet away then. You are six feet away now.
The one thing I do see changing, however, is that you are probably more social now than you were then.
You spend more time now with your family, if you are blessed to have a family – your parents, your siblings, your loved ones, your children… yes, even your pets.
And if you are in solitude, are you really? For possibly now, when you connect with a friend, you connect to talk, to share, to learn and to tell, to relate and to resonate on all that is human.
And if you do not have friends, take one giant flip of your Facebook feed, and chances are that it would be a revolving reel of photos and videos of people being… people. As anxious and concerned as you are, as eager to help and be helped as you are, as real and alive as you are.
We are not going to lose our minds.
There is no impending verge of insanity.
In fact this may be what we needed more than ever.
Chronicles 