WEIGHTLESS

What is wrong with this scene?

Ex­cited chil­dren play­ing to­gether in a Barcelona street, their par­ents stand­ing nearby watch­ing, chat­ting, smil­ing.

Of course, only a few months ago, there was every­thing nat­ural, nor­mal and per­fectly ‘right’ about this every­day pic­ture. Now (at least at the time of writ­ing) the re­spon­si­ble adults in the scene are break­ing the law and can be fined for it. Some­thing that was as whole­some as a sum­mer day sud­denly be­came an awful sin.

So, how are peo­ple in our part of the world deal­ing with this and other sim­i­lar flips of fate?

One per­son who has a sharp in­sight into how Cat­alo­nia is cop­ing at the mo­ment is Aus­tralian psy­chol­o­gist Leigh Matthews, owner and founder of Ther­apy in Barcelona. In mid-March, fly­ing back to Barcelona after vis­it­ing the Al­ham­bra for her 43rd birth­day, she trav­elled from the plea­sures of Granada into a city under lock­down.

Leigh be­lieves that Covid-19 has all the in­gre­di­ents of the kind of col­lec­tive, trau­matic cri­sis that she rou­tinely deals with on a per­sonal level in her work: the el­e­ment of sur­prise, a threat to es­sen­tial as­pects of life and loss of con­trol.

She says she is able to bear wit­ness to the sto­ries of her in­ter­na­tional col­leagues and clients. In her opin­ion, they bring expat pow­ers of adapt­abil­ity and a com­fort with am­bi­gu­ity to dif­fi­cul­ties that are firsts for every­one here.

As a com­par­i­son, the cur­rent num­ber of in­fec­tions in Spain stands at 264,663 and deaths at 26,620 whereas Aus­tralia’s are at 6,941 and 97. “This dis­par­ity is great,” Leigh says. “Here we are tor­mented with a huge toll and suf­fo­cat­ing re­stric­tions, but Aus­tralians, with their elab­o­rate eco­nomic res­cue pack­age and com­par­a­tively mild threat, are also gripped with un­cer­tainty, grief and ex­haus­tion from ground­hog days of con­fine­ment.”

To Leigh, the pan­demic re­minds her of the en­gi­neers charged with sav­ing the lives of the as­tro­nauts in the Apollo 13 space cap­sule al­most ex­actly 50 years ago. They solved the cru­cial prob­lem of mak­ing a square fil­ter fit into a space that had only been de­signed for a round fil­ter. In her view, what gov­ern­ments in Cat­alo­nia and Spain have to face is some­thing very sim­i­lar to the Apollo 13 sce­nario.

She be­lieves the ques­tion for the au­thor­i­ties is es­sen­tially the same one for many peo­ple: doing what is pos­si­ble. “Iden­tify a prob­lem. Throw the re­sources you have to deal with it onto the table and fig­ure out how to man­age the prob­lem. Vari­a­tion in con­ta­gion and death rates aside, we all face the “Apollo 13 ex­er­cise” daily – fum­bling for so­lu­tions to work­ing from home while cri­sis school­ing, mas­ter­ing the Virab­hadrasana pose in on­line yoga and si­mul­ta­ne­ously man­ag­ing stress, grief, trauma and death anx­i­ety with the men­ace of in­fec­tion and eco­nomic im­pair­ment loom­ing over us,” she says.

“As a psy­chol­o­gist I can give you the shop­ping list of cop­ing strate­gies. I can tell you there is re­silience to cel­e­brate, but re­silience is in­ter­sected by priv­i­lege and the do­mes­tic, po­lit­i­cal and eco­nomic the­atres we in­habit. The co­hort of peo­ple in my life are well re­sourced, but the pan­demic is as mul­ti­tudi­nous as each story of every per­son liv­ing it. Many sto­ries won’t have an Apollo 13 fi­nale. They came up with some­thing ad­e­quate and so can we, even if it’s just wear­ing a mask to take care of oth­ers or writ­ing a “new nor­mal” that em­braces every­one.”

Per­son­ally speak­ing, some days I feel the grav­ity of the sit­u­a­tion hold­ing me down. On other days, like the Apollo 13 crew, I am weight­less. I al­most float.