We are coming up to five years now since it arrived: you will each have your own memories of how you were affected, what changes to your life you had to make. Because the changes were sudden and dramatic. Covid appeared in January 2020 from China; by February in Italy people were forbidden from going out of their houses; and by the end of March we in the UK were in lockdown. And a lot of people were in hospital, and a lot of people were dying - and one realised this was not going to go away soon, that something was happening that was affecting, and was going to affect, everything we did.
It may be
hard to remember the sheer surprise and drama and fearfulness of those months.
I remember writing, talking, about it in that early period: about life from now on being divided into two
time periods: BC and AC. BC was Before Covid – which we’d look back to with
nostalgia for its freedoms, and our assumptions of how life could go on pretty
much unchanged; a period of naivete and wishful thinking. And then there’d be
AC – and AC didn’t mean ‘After Covid was over’, because for that first year there didn’t seem
any possibility of that, but AC meant the new reality of living with an
uncontrollable disease that had turned our lives and our freedoms upside down.
Why recall
this ancient history? Well, not only because new variants of Covid are around
that are evading the vaccines and causing mayhem to people’s well-being; but
also because things happened in 2020 that shouldn’t just be swept under the
carpet now that Covid just raises a yawn. Because that first year was pre-jab
and the speed with which vaccines were developed was an extraordinary and
almost miraculous international endeavour – although we just accept that now as
if it’s just what medical science does, find the drugs we need to keep us
going. But we didn’t know at the time how long it would take to develop some
protection – or indeed it was going to be a possibility.
In those
first 9 months with the dynamics of lockdowns and ‘bubbles’ and 2 metres
distance, there were two parallel strands of experience: there was the brutal
reality of over-stretched hospitals, of care homes overwhelmed, of all the
death and suffering, numbers kept on rising; and there was the disproportionate
impact on ethnic minorities – I’ll never forget the picture spread in the
Guardian after a couple of months of thumbnail photos of dozens and dozens and
dozens of front line staff of NHS doctors and nurses who’d already died and
they were almost all Asian and black faces; and that wasn’t just a reflection
of how much the NHS is dependent on British and non-British ethnic minority
staff but the particular historical and social circumstances that made some
people more constitutionally vulnerable than others. This was a particular kind
of British scandal that maybe the ongoing UK Covid Inquiry might illuminate –
or maybe not.
But suffice
it to say that there were all these dark and desperate social realities going
on as people suffered, there was all the pain of separations in hospices and care
homes, the heartbreaking inability to be with some one as they were dying; and then
there was the claustrophobia for children not at school, for teenagers who
couldn’t meet their friends, for community life no longer functioning. All this
just descended on us.
And yet in
parallel to that, and maybe you had to have a degree of middle-class privilege
to appreciate it, there was something else that happened: there was a quiet
that descended as roads became almost traffic free – apart from grocery
delivery trucks that suddenly became a lifeline – the air in the street was
fresher, at a time when breathlessness was a major issue, you could breathe in
the air when you walked outside, you could hear the birds, who seemed to take
over the urban soundscape; you could look
up at quiet plane-less skies as international air traffic just stopped, overnight;
animals started appearing in deserted city streets; and meanwhile new bonds
were being made closer to home – neighbours, community, human contact took on a
much sharper focus and value in our lives. Screen life became a lifeline for
many, opening up new ways of being together. You met new neighbours on those weekly
evening appreciation gatherings for NHS staff. Something emerged that was
healthy and life-affirming.
It was as if
there was a glimpse of a whole new way of life that had become possible, with
more humane values – patterns of work and business and leisure all changed,
people realised that maybe they didn’t have to fly abroad on holiday or for
work and their lives wouldn’t collapse,
they could even be enhanced. The great slowing down that was forced on us as a
society opened up new possibilities, a glimpse of how we could live together
without such manipulation of the environment, without so much abuse of resources,
without so much anger on the streets. Acts of kindness to other rippled through
society.
So on the
one hand there was this awareness – or so it seemed – ‘things will never be the
same again, we didn’t know how fortunate we were’, as if we’d be been living in
a Golden Age. It felt like it might have done to those who’d lived in Edwardian
England 1910, 1911, 1912, a world that those living through it never realised
would soon be gone forever; along with that regret that we hadn’t sufficiently
appreciated things.
But it was balanced
with that growing awareness that maybe something was being opened up for us,
maybe something was being offered to us, as if – and here I speak in a language
that anthropomorphises the virus in a way that is intellectually suspect, but I
will do it anyway to make the point - it was as if the virus had appeared from
some deep place of a planetary consciousness that was forcing us destructive
plunderers of earth and air and water into a realisation that we could all
manage with much less, that we could all survive and thrive by focusing on the
simple and sustaining good things of life: human connectivity, attention to
nature, attention to living more lightly on the planet and in the world.
As if the
virus was on the side of the ongoing survival of all interconnected life forms
on the planet, not just homo sapiens.
We would
never have chosen what happened to us, and it was no gift, but certain lessons
became available to us through it. And those lessons seem worth trying to spell
out now. Firstly, the work of being human means learning to pay attention, to
find out what really matters about human flourishing, and pay attention to what
matters here and now; secondly, we were being told to learn to be patient, not a
quality that we find easy: be patient, and find out what it is that really
counts, don’t just grab for something because it is there or because someone
else has it – not everything we think we need, or we’re told we must have, do
we really need.
So: pay
attention to what matters; cultivate patience; and thirdly, keep a humble eye
on your dependence on your body – remember that your body is vulnerable, it
will wear out and you will die, but while you can still breathe, appreciate it,
treasure it, it is carrying your life
forward moment by moment.
I was wrong
about BC and AC – for most of us, most of the time, it’s as if Covid was just a
blip, an inconvenience, that we have put behind us. Life has gone back to so-called
‘normal’. Of course if you lost loved ones, or if you are still suffering from
the complex aftereffects of long Covid, it’s not just a blip. But so little has
really changed – work patterns, to some extent; and yes there’s been a knock-on
effect for schoolchildren and students. But that glimpse of another world to
live in – where has that gone?
It’s as if
that year, before the vaccines, the year of living more frugally, more simply,
more focused on what really mattered – that tantalising intimation of other
possibilities than the derangements of late capitalism – the door to an
alternative way of living and being has closed almost shut. But maybe we can
peek back in again – my own uncomfortable debilitating brush with Covid these
last few weeks has prompted me to look back in and wonder what might have been
lost.
I would
never describe Covid as a gift, but collectively it was an opportunity. Can we
still salvage something from it? After all, I think I am not alone in feeling
something was missed. There was an extraordinary YouGov survey done in that
first 6 months, in the UK, where people cited the air quality and the wildlife
and the closer social bonds and other factors and 85% of those questioned said
they wanted to retain at least some of the changes wrought by the pandemic.
Fewer that 1 in 10 wanted to return to the status quo ante. So what are we
doing with that knowledge, those wishes, and hopes? I don’t believe they have been lost. We need
to keep that door ajar. Glimpses of another way of living don’t come along that
often.
[based on
a sermon at Finchley Reform Synagogue, January 4th, 2025]
