Meditation in a toolshed by Playmobible |
I'm typing this on my banana bench in front of my house, keeping 1,5 metre distance to my fellow human beings, and enjoying it much, the 1,5 meter and everything else. (Spring is in the air, too, but that is a yearly pandemic.) Social distancing gives me, well, s p a c e .
What else? My calendar is empty. I don't need to see anyone. (Not that anyone wanted to see me in the first place. The social costs are nil.)
Work. Sitting behind keyboards whenever I feel like it and typing whatever comes to mind has always been my 'profession'. (The freedom I allow myself has changed perhaps. In the early days I only dared to write stuff that I knew others would find important and true). I have never made much money with this, but I don't care about money above base income level. (I'm actually surprised to find intelligent people who do.)
Which brings me to the global economy. This crisis proves that most things and activities are perfectly superfluous. (Like I said before: literature, writing, my 'job', might be the most redundant of all.) Another way to put it, in the words of poor Andrew Cuomo (I'm glad I'm not Andrew Cuomo right now), we must recalibrate our lives. Lower our expectations. Focus on the silence. And guess what? Only if you cut people off of certain luxuries, if you take everything away from them, travel, restaurants, 'events' (how I hate that word) etcetera, they discover they can do without them. Is Greta Thunberg secretly or not so secretly chuckling? It wouldn't surprise me. Corona is the check we're receiving for an unchecked life.
Meanwhile, lockdown – intelligent or not – makes me claustrophobic. I wish I were a writer without a family that is in my face every moment of the day. Or a writer with a family and a huge house (I don't know of such writers.)
Then again, my fellow inmates are my greatest source of comfort and joy, comfort and joy, and I wouldn't know how to secrete oxytocine without them.
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Wat fijn dat jullie er zijn