Taking stock

I’m not re­li­gious, so the idea of some form of heaven and hell do not nor­mally enter my vo­cab­u­lary, but two years of what seem like pur­ga­tory have led me to take a de­ci­sion about this col­umn: from now on I will be fo­cus­ing on the pos­i­tive. No more whin­ing about cul­tural cus­toms I don’t like – be they local, from my na­tive coun­try or from afar. And to start off with, I’m going to talk about the pos­i­tive con­se­quences of the cur­rent sit­u­a­tion. Are there any? I hear you ask. Well yes, there quite def­i­nitely are, so let’s take a look.

I’m going to group them into three sec­tions: ex­pand­ing knowl­edge/skills, im­prov­ing re­la­tions, and re­flec­tion. Lock­down has al­lowed most peo­ple to ded­i­cate time to things they ei­ther used to like doing in the past or have al­ways wanted to, among oth­ers: read­ing great books (the dreaded ques­tion from a dystopian fu­ture “What’s a book, grandad?” has al­ways haunted me), writ­ing, play­ing a mu­si­cal in­stru­ment, cook­ing, mak­ing and doing quizzes... in other words, cre­ative, cul­tural and in­tel­lec­tual pur­suits that I would say ad­vance the human con­di­tion, and that has to be wel­comed.

In my own case, rather than play music and write songs, some­thing I ex­pected to do more of, hav­ing loved doing that when I had more time in my youth, I ac­tu­ally ended up read­ing more, es­pe­cially Shake­speare, which I had such a pas­sion for as a young man and have al­ways wanted to reim­merse my­self in. In fact, I set my­self the task of read­ing his 37 plays in order (in my mind, “to see whether I could de­tect his writ­ing get­ting any bet­ter as the years pro­gressed”). I wont re­veal how far I got, other than to say it is still very much a work “in progress”. I also thought I would write more, but it turns out that I do so much writ­ing in my daily work that I re­ally didn’t want to do any more of that in my lock­down free time. Hope­fully you will have your own re­ward­ing pur­suits that have ex­panded your knowl­edge or skillset dur­ing this pe­riod.

As for im­prov­ing re­la­tions, first there are con­nec­tions with loved ones: strange as it may seem, I have had far more con­tact with fam­ily and friends in the UK than usual dur­ing lock­down. I guess there’s been more time and in­cen­tive to video­con­fer­ence, and I’ve made the most of it, with sev­eral video­con­fer­ences a week rather than one or two a month. That has led to im­proved re­la­tions in my case, al­though I un­der­stand if you’ve ac­tu­ally been in lock­down with your own fam­ily you may now want to get a bit of breath­ing space from them. And an­other happy con­se­quence of lock­down for many has been get­ting to know their neigh­bours bet­ter due to all that pub­lic clap­ping.

And the final cat­e­gory: stock­tak­ing. What I mean by this is the op­por­tu­nity to re­flect on your life and take stock of your sit­u­a­tion. Some peo­ple, and I’m afraid I’ve been one of them, tend to lead their life at break­neck speed with­out stop­ping to re­flect on their medium and long-term goals and as­pi­ra­tions, a habit that is clearly rec­om­mend­able if you want to make the most of your short time on this planet. The chance to do this has led me to take up med­i­ta­tion again, which has helped me stay bal­anced dur­ing these emo­tion­ally drain­ing times. I was going to write more about that, but I’m out of space... you see? Plenty of pos­i­tive as­pects to focus on if we choose to.