You have been locked at home for all of summer and what would have been a normal semester. So many things have been taken away from you: The encounters within and between classes that build and seal friendships, the endless meetings that teach creativity and resilience, and the nurturing moments dwelling amongst friends and greenery. For some of you, this is your last year in school and you will have to experience it in confinement.
Certainly, much more is being taken away from other people, especially the marginalized youths. But today, you face the simple fact that you are being called to suffer a crisis like no other in living memory, and it does weigh heavily on your spirits. Like all things that weigh heavily on us, perhaps we can lighten its load if we could begin to articulate what it is.
We can call this crisis a temporary disruption. One day, things will go back to normal and everything will be restored. If we are just patient enough to survive all the anxiety, we will be able to go back to life as we knew it. So be patient. This pandemic that keeps you locked up at home is just a very long and pregnant pause. You can bawi consume, travel, and party again after. For now, stay put and stay in cyberspace school.
With this pandemic, all that was put on hold for a bit. Like any break from what we are used to, it is a chance to reassess what we are deprived of in order to weigh their necessity. Those things that we used to do a lot caused global warming, species extinctions, and pandemic causing invasion of habitats—not to mention global inequalities. If we could only sustain this lifestyle, we could avoid the very scary things that global warming will bring, and we could also reduce the ongoing mass extinction.
What this pause is giving us is the opportunity to rethink the destructive way we live in order to realize that it isn’t so bad to live sustainably. It is showing everyone, if only anyone would see, that we don’t have to do the things we did to live well.
But it’s not so easy to reform, is it? We all know that this sudden pause caused greater poverty for the marginalized millions and economic insecurity for the middle classes. When the infections ease up, governments will scramble to get us to spend to get the economy going because people need to earn money again to live. But we need to find a way to transition to a good normal that will bring about equity and sustainability. That’s a very complex knot to untangle, but with this pause, we know that we are not captive to life as we knew it.
Maybe there is another way to talk about this lockdown. Sure, much of our anxiety these past months was caused by the deprivation of our broader community and open spaces, but a great part of our anxieties was caused by the sudden withdrawal from our world destroying busyness. If we are to build better, we need to recognize how the lockdown is a period of withdrawal from a life of addictions. Instead of anxiously focusing on when our diversions will be restored, we should focus on the living we are doing without them.
Agustin Martin Rodriguez, Ph.D. is a professor from the Department of Philosophy.
