Staring into a Second Lockdown

 

Back in March, I was locked down with a 15-month-old still napping twice a day. With no daycare, we took shifts. I got the afternoon shift and took him out in the stroller to the neighbourhood park, and then into the nearby, quiet cemetery to make him sleep.

While the sick died for want of ventilators in the hallways of Milan’s hospitals, and while China introduced state surveillance that would make the heart of the Stasi go pitter patter, I watched winter turn into spring. Every day, I walked into the cemetery and saw a few more leaves on the trees, the birds' nests get a little bigger, and the days get longer and sunnier. It was so lovely that I forgot how rough other people had it. I just lacked the perspective, even as I strolled past graves everyday.

As we stare into the void of a second lockdown, it all feels the same, but different, and darker. The headlines scream about higher infection rates, the trees shed their leaves, the birds migrate south, and days get shorter, colder, and darker.

So, I was feeling a little down at the prospect of spending a winter indoors.

Until I had a call with my parents, who mentioned their weekly family Zoom call, in which my Opa said he wasn't going anywhere for Christmas because it wasn't worth the risk. He's in his 90s, and well into the risk group. When someone mentioned that it's Christmas, he pointed out that he missed four Christmases in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands during the War. One Christmas isn't so bad.

That snapped me out of my self-centered, me-focused, life-is-so-hard-in-my-nice-home whine fest about a winter lockdown. I needed some perspective to remember that I don't have it that bad. In fact, most of us don't have it that bad when compared others who deal with the coronavirus, like patients, families of patients, doctors, nurses, grocery store employees, or your food delivery dude who are all a little closer to the horrors the coronavirus has created.

 

It's all about perspective. So, am I going to make this about myself? Or am I going to look around, look at the news, look at history, and see that it ain't so bad. Spring will be along soon enough, and the summer, and then we'll all be vaccinated and stuck in crowded trains, shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers, all of us wishing we were locked down again.