But on the bright side

Let me say I’m aware of the con­tra­dic­tion in writ­ing about tak­ing a break from the issue of coro­n­avirus in a col­umn about the pan­demic, and which aims to di­rect you to an ar­ti­cle in the mag­a­zine that you might want to check out, which this month is the fea­ture on pages 14 to 19 about the sim­i­lar­i­ties, or rather dif­fer­ences, be­tween today’s cri­sis and the 1918 Span­ish flu pan­demic.

That said, let us begin.

“The worst thing we can do is to be con­nected 24 hours a day to the issue of coro­n­avirus.” That is clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gist Jaume Descar­rega talk­ing, who had ad­vice about get­ting through the cri­sis in a re­cent ar­ti­cle by the Cata­lan News Agency. The doc­tor said cram­ming on coro­n­avirus won’t make us bet­ter in­formed, but will just in­crease our anx­i­ety.

It’s good ad­vice, but hard to fol­low, es­pe­cially if you work in the media (or a hos­pi­tal, or a su­per­mar­ket for that mat­ter), where all your time at work re­volves around the im­pact of Covid-19. Of course, there is no es­cape for any of us, as the pan­demic has in­fected our so­ci­ety to its core, and that’s with­out think­ing about the fall­out. Will there be a vac­cine? What will the final death toll be? Will the econ­omy be in tat­ters? Will the foot­ball sea­son be de­clared null and void? Let’s not think about that now.

With coro­n­avirus off the table, where does that leave us? I only have my own ex­pe­ri­ence to draw on and that of a few peo­ple I’ve spo­ken to. Yet, I imag­ine it’s not too far from what most peo­ple are going through, con­fined as we all are to home and con­cerned about what will hap­pen next.

The other day, I took part in an eight-way on­line chat with a group of friends who live around the world, most of whom I haven’t seen for ages, and a cou­ple with whom I’ve shared lit­tle more than a few hastily typed mes­sages. We had a blast, and hardly talked about the cri­sis. We’re going to do it again next week­end, and it could be­come a reg­u­lar thing.

Mean­while, an ac­quain­tance told me how he’d spent the first days at home drink­ing beer while sit­ting on the sofa watch­ing TV. It sounded good to me, but he went on to say that he got bored and started doing some­thing he’d al­ways wanted to ex­plore, but had al­ways put off: med­i­ta­tion. He’s now been med­i­tat­ing twice a day for the past week, and has begun re­search­ing on­line and read­ing books about it.

To give one other ex­am­ple, some­one else told me how they’d gone back to the gui­tar after years of let­ting it gather dust in the cor­ner. Com­mut­ing to work, a busy fam­ily life, and al­most a sense of dis­ap­point­ment in him­self for not mak­ing more of his pas­sion had put him off pick­ing up his in­stru­ment in re­cent years. He’s now back strum­ming away.

What I think these ex­am­ples have in com­mon is see­ing this pe­riod of quar­an­tine and the col­lec­tive shock from an event that has al­ready im­pacted all our lives so deeply as an op­por­tu­nity. It doesn’t mat­ter whether you take the chance to en­hance per­sonal re­la­tion­ships, im­prove your mind or body, or ex­press your cre­ativ­ity, the im­por­tant thing is to take it while it lasts, be­cause thank­fully it won’t last for­ever.

And the psy­chol­o­gists agree. In the same ar­ti­cle, psy­chol­o­gist Ana Gutiérrez said that we have to play to our strengths and rise to the chal­lenge rather than let it beat us. “It’s im­por­tant to know that by stay­ing at home we’re con­tribut­ing to some­thing pos­i­tive that helps every­one,” and she added we should try to get some­thing good out of the ex­pe­ri­ence, “some­thing re­ward­ing that we can learn from.”

I couldn’t agree more, al­though the oc­ca­sional beer in front of the telly is also okay.