Now’s the time to be getting creative
In 1968, the Wahine survivors, plucked from the raging sea, sang together in their liferafts. All in the same boat, they sang the songs they knew. It brought them together.
The Christchurch earthquakes mobilised the student army, the mosque attacks brought people together in large numbers. In such situations, people congregate, hug and get up close and personal.
The opposite is solitary confinement. Forget togetherness, you’re on your own. Solitary is punishment. Isolation is a negative term – except during pandemics.
But strangely, as more and more of us go into self-isolation, the coming months bring exciting opportunities.
We have a choice: we can treat home as confinement or take advantage of it as ‘‘re-definement’’. We can change how we see ourselves from being isolated units into a cohesive community taking action.
The campaigns to ‘‘keep it out’’ and then ‘‘stamp it out’’ are taking shape. Next, we need an additional campaign to maximise the opportunities the on-screen university we all have at home brings us.
Just as we gear up for the health emergency, so too we can gear up for the biggest chance for self-development and passive recreation since the invention of the internet. Never before in the history of being sick at home has so much been available to so many that’s so new.
Think about the things we did on holiday with the kids in the rain. Out came the cards, the games, the activities. Too tame by today’s standards, but now the whole world has been caught by the net and served up on screen.
For some, the period of so-called isolation would require entertainment only. Some could learn French, start that novel, teach their children origami. The music we never made time for can reverberate through suburbia. Meditation anyone? No? Then how about the best movies ever to woo the alone-crowd. When commerce emptied out of Christchurch after the quakes, the artists moved in. Now, as markets teeter and businesses fail, we need our creative people to colonise our paused lives with fresh ideas. We need to avoid feeling like victims, and take control of time at home.
The Government has a role to kick this off. Campaigns such as Dig For Victory and Keep Calm and Carry On were government-initiated but were quickly adopted by the community.
So Jacinda, bring the best brains from the creative and broadcasting sectors together. We need their ideas and we need screen time to communicate them.
We need everyone to think creatively about using their time in self-isolation so they gain power and ownership over the situation they find themselves in. Instead of feeling down, they can be empowered to redefine how they want to be, what they value and how they want to treat others. Grant Stevenson ran a communications and events company in Wellington.