Escape from Lockdown

In the early days back home, it felt safe to be locked up at home. After my two weeks of isolation at home, on brief forays out, people were nicer. There was a sense of some frightening but shared experience. People crowded around radios to hear the latest news and pandemic announcements, and it felt like the stories I’ve heard of wartime: it was a time of great peril and solidarity.

Over the nearly two years that have followed, all of this became the new normal – the reduced horizons, and the regular, worsening news reports filled with dire projections of a world struggling to cope. The sense of solidarity faded as the harsh reality hit home, that this would not be over in months, that the death toll would run into the millions, and that it could be a very long time before we could travel again to places and people we longed to see.

In two years, my only journey outside my home state of Victoria, was a ten-day trip into the Great Sandy Desert, northwest of Alice Springs. There, in the company of elderly Warlpiri Aboriginal women, I learned the healing power of silence and ancient lands. I paid for my brief dose of freedom: the day after my return home, we went into the strictest form of isolation, and within two days, I went from a seemingly eternal horizon to not even being allowed to go out my front door. Even so, the memories of whispering desert oaks and sand dunes and storytelling around campfires sustained me over the long months that followed.

I well knew that an inability to travel ranked low on the list of grave pandemic consequences. But I also came to see travel and its complications as emblematic of what the pandemic had done to the world. Gone was the early solidarity: our inability to visit far-off places contributed to an increasingly inward gaze, and when it came time to distribute vaccines, we looked after ourselves first. And for all the doomsaying that the world, that travel, would never be the same again, that we would return from our time-out to reassess our relationship with nature, the early signs were that the two years of the pandemic were less a paradigm shift than a hiatus that changed everything and nothing.

Article source: https://article-realm.com/article/Health-Fitness/47172-BOC-Chemical-Services.html