CoVID-19 – week 14

I’m bingeing on stuff that makes me feel sad and lonely and I’m struggling to get off the programme. It’s not necessarily stuff that is tragic or isolating, the problem is it’s stuff that contains hope and fulfilment but opens up pathos rather than optimism in me.

It’s as if my mind were a collection of rooms filled with people having various discussions but rather than them being healthy, open and enquiring they are introspective, speculative and dogmatic. As if they were held in camera, they inform themselves via an echo chamber rather than an open consultation.

I’m pretty sure it comes from a general sense of hopelessness, masked by individual and isolated pockets of optimism. I sense it comes from a place of dashed hopes and disappointments, regrets and remorse, wounds and fractures. This pandemic has focused our minds in so many ways yet, like a cut cloth, there is fraying at the edge for lack of a hem.

In discussing and debating the way forward we would hope to apply stitches but at the moment all that seems to have been achieved is picking at a few more loose threads. Even in an atmosphere of potential progress the garment on the cutting table is hem-less and I haven’t the patience or inclination to thread the needle.

At a time where beginnings and endings lack distinction we need starting blocks and finishing lines. Many of us came into this crisis already treading water having lost sight of the shore. We now look to a horizon devoid of features and in need of a landmark and a compass (and a map might help).

We knew politicians lie but the framework has shifted. Where once we treated the lies like pieces of the same jigsaw there are now no corners or straight edges and the completed picture is incoherent. Maybe this is the reality we’ve not faced faced up to or cared to acknowledge in the past. Nevertheless it’s distressing now.

If we are to distill order out of this chaos we need to rediscover focal points obscured by the neo-normal surety of the last few decades that we were cynically kettled into. I need to separate the true sources of comfort and inspiration from the stimulants and depressants I’ve fed myself with that, more to take away the pain than give relief, have simply fed my addiction.

Unfortunately we are not at a place where we have answers when we most needed them but the questions are possibly clearer and more incisive. The way forward is neither clear nor