Celebrate joys of life in isolation
IT’S taken a month to get used to it but I think I might actually be starting to prefer this life to the old one.
Well, some aspects of it, I should say. Obviously not all of it.
It goes without saying we could live without the sharpest economic collapse since the Great Depression.
And clearly it would be good if we could still take the kids round to see their grandparents.
It would be nice too to be able to meet up with friends for a coffee, while seeing the pubs dark and empty is a painful sight for those of us who like pubs.
But aside from the massive rise in unemployment, economic insecurity and social isolation, along with the attendant rises in mental illness and depression — not to mention the ever present threat of death that now comes just from popping into Coles — this life has a lot going for it, I’ve come to realise. Well it does if you have small children. If you are young, single and keen to get out on the tear, it would be pretty bloody dull, I acknowledge. Also, I get that if you are doing Year 12, it is far from ideal to be spending so much of it at home rather than in a classroom. But if you’re six years old — as my son is — a term at Mum-and-Dad Primary won’t do you much harm. You might even pick up some things more quickly than you would have at school.
For parents, it’s certainly a more relaxed way to start the day being able to get them straight into schoolwork right after breakfast rather than having to make sure they’re dressed properly, their lunches are packed, they’re wearing the right shoes (because today is PE) and rushing out the front door, as by then we’re late before then rushing back in because the library books have been forgotten.
That is nothing however to the sheer novelty and pleasure of eating three meals a day together as a family for weeks on end, something we’ve only ever done on holiday.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve travelled back in time to the 1970s, except now I’m an adult. The similarities are eerie. Indeed with all shops closed, every day feels like a Melbourne Sunday from my childhood. The other day I was quietly cursing the fact it may be a year — if not years! — before we are able to travel freely overseas again (sorry but New Zealand doesn’t count) when it struck me that for my parents and most people of their peers, this was completely normal.
When I was a kid, going overseas was such a big deal it was common for extended families to head out to Tullamarine to see off the travellers.
I don’t want to labour the point. Clearly there are differences.
There’s more to watch on TV for a start. The takeaway food options have come along more too, not to mention the improvement in the quality of what we might call “everyday” drinking wine, which back in my childhood was dispensed from a series of large, frequently replaced cardboard boxes.
But that said there is a slowness to this isolation life that I am finding appealing. It is nice not worrying about where you have to be because there’s nowhere to be. It’s also nice to know that everyone is in the same boat.
You’re stuck at home but everyone else is stuck at home too. There are no parties taking place anywhere to which you haven’t been invited.
The streets seem safer too as there are more people on them taking their daily exercise than there usually are.
Not to mention the lack of traffic. Last week I took my daughter out on her bicycle — if something with training wheels can be so-called — and I thought nothing of getting her to ride on the middle of the road.
It wasn’t until later it struck me how odd that would have seemed at any other time. I am also enjoying exercising and playing with them in the park every day, a sentence I cannot imagine having written a month ago, involving as it does the prospect of voluntary physical activity.
It’s embarrassing of course to have to admit that it has taken the end of the world as we knew it to show me pleasures that were right under my nose.
But I am sure I am not the only one who has been discovering this past month that there is more to life than an endless series of treats.
Out walking with our kids the other day I said to my wife how lucky I felt that this had happened when they were still very young and that in years to come this will be the time that we look back on as the happiest.
As I said, I’m just sorry it took a calamity.