Sweet emotions of the soul

What on Earth do we make of this time?

Tragedies mount. Iso­la­tion bites. Brav­ery and self­less ser­vice by a mi­nor­ity pound the con­sciences of the ma­jor­ity.

We are de­nied con­tact, more aware than ever now how much we need to be to­gether.

Na­ture am­pli­fies and we HAVE TO no­tice how the planet is cry­ing out.

2020 is ques­tion­ing al­most every­thing.

It is like we are in the eye of a storm, ig­no­rant of di­rec­tion and force, wait­ing for news like spooked char­ac­ters in the un­fold­ing dis­as­ter films that some – maybe, bizarrely, still do – find en­ter­tain­ing. (We never have).

Much is said about who will save us from the epi­demic. Not a lot is said about who will save us from our­selves.

Fast for­ward to post vac­cine. 2021. Will we scrab­ble to get back to what was 2019? How ugly will that be? Does Trump-The-Grotesque re­flect all that we de­serve? Or can we do bet­ter, much much bet­ter?

The eco­nomic fall­out will be be­yond in­tense, we all know that. The pres­sure is build­ing fast to get back on the beast, al­though for a sig­nif­i­cant and grow­ing num­ber it is al­ready too late with re­ces­sion/de­pres­sion tak­ing liveli­hoods and load­ing men­tal health pres­sures across com­mu­ni­ties. We are not, though, as if it needs spelling out, all in this to­gether. The poor­est and most vul­ner­a­ble, in­clud­ing some of the low­est paid peo­ple in so­ci­ety, are pay­ing with more than money.

I said 2020 ques­tions every­thing. It should. But will those with every­thing vested in the sta­tus quo, too many of whom are de­cid­ing pol­icy at such a crit­i­cal time, even lis­ten?

This fright­ens me more than the virus. The val­ues held by so many pop­ulist, male world lead­ers are di­a­met­ri­cally op­posed to what is es­sen­tial now. I take it we have all no­ticed that the most pos­i­tive, hope­ful, car­ing re­sponses have been in coun­tries with women lead­ers.

If we learn noth­ing we de­serve noth­ing. The here and now must be ed­i­fy­ing. I give daily thanks for being part of such an in­clu­sive, re­silient and car­ing so­ci­ety, for what does not have a price - fam­ily and friends, home, vil­lage and co­marca.

And I ab­solutely in­clude my in­ter­de­pen­dence with na­ture in that. Yours too. We have to change our ways and take im­me­di­ate and di­rect re­spon­si­bil­ity for sus­tain­ing all life. It is time to stop look­ing away.

How strange and sig­nif­i­cant it is that boxed in we can now see dis­tance.

The air is as clear as it has ever been in our life­times. Friends in one of the major cities of the world, ten mil­lion strong, took to their flat roof to breathe. For the first time in the decades they have lived there they could see clean across the me­trop­o­lis to the hills and farm­land on the far side.

Most of us can now see all the more clearly the chal­lenges of those al­ready iso­lated and vul­ner­a­ble in our so­ci­eties, this shut­down shock defin­ing, too, how hard it is to live on ben­e­fits and char­ity.

A pos­i­tive. This face-mask mo­ment means the eyes have it. The win­dows to our souls can­not tell a lie. The eye smile can­not be faked be­cause, well, it is be­yond our con­trol. They call it the Duchenne smile, after the French anatomist, who de­fined that the mus­cle around the eye, the or­bic­u­laris oculi, will only be trig­gered into ac­tion by the “sweet emo­tions of the soul”.

And it is pos­i­tively con­ta­gious.