CoVID-19 day 53

There was some confusion over whether Boris Johnson’s broadcast last Sunday was confusing or not. Its a little like processing “Sorry, I don’t love you any more”, a statement that’s about as clear as you could hope yet rarely could you be more conflicted over something so apparently straightforward.

That terra firma is not moving isn’t what bothers me, its that I’m trying to adjust to it as if it were

Some would say its semantics, another word that covers a multitude of sins, but when you are dealing with a crisis of this magnitude in a 13 minute speech, any hint of confusion is very concerning. I found it as stressful parsing this debate as trying to understand how the nation’s leader could be so irresponsible both in the message and its timing. Life has felt simpler when our choices and activities have been limited. There’s something strangely comforting about queuing up outside the shop, moving along the line until you are told you can enter. Then you follow the arrows in a one way shop through the isles. Oh for the days when you could have any colour you want so long as its black.

Our lives have become so complicated that when the freedoms we took for granted were taken away we become disoriented much as when you walk on terra firma after a time at sea, the ground feels like it moving as you adjust to not doing so. I wake up concerned about what I should be doing today because I’m conflicted over my sanity, not my diary. So often you hear parents remonstrating with their kids to get them to do the simplest of things, tearing their hair out because its so difficult to achieve something so simple. The irony is that while the parent is far more sophisticated and complex than the child, the opposite is true when it comes to the thought process because the parent has forgotten how much they had to learn before they’d got it down to a reflex.

Anyone who’s worked with special needs appreciates how much more complex instructions have to be to achieve the most mundane of tasks yet breaking down what is second nature brings clarity into what motivates and instructs us. What’s most confusing and frankly, terrifying, is coming out of a lockdown that wasn’t anything like as straightforward or strict as it should have been and finding ourselves in a place where we are still being told to abide by the rules but rules that don’t make sense.

I’m confused in the way I would be if dropped into a city I’d never lived in or visited. That terra firma is not moving isn’t what bothers me, its that I’m trying to adjust to it as if it were.