Yes there’s a Pandemic still, but have we Lost the Resolve to Care?

A year has roughly 52 weeks, three of which are already gone. Is time flying or, are our days simply merging into one another, rendering calendars useless? Are you feeling the fatigue of falling into patterns that are beyond your control? Do you feel scared of coughing when you call your kin? Do you own more than one thermometer? Are you already hoping for 2023 to be your year? Between the last wave (does it even matter which) and the next, flickers of hope took flight. Colleges, malls, restaurants and theatres opened up, their collective bravery challenging the heavens above. Shutters went up briefly, bringing people some bouts of relief. Post-pandemic had finally stopped being a distant dream. But all we have done is jump from Dalgona to Dolo, hop onto fresh new trends to drag us through a wave, which feels less of a wave because we may have simply stopped caring.

Like you, I was perhaps also, more ignorant than optimistic that this had, indeed, passed. But what did I know, right?

Before news cycles brimmed with Greek names no one wished to learn this way, I can bet, you, like me, could almost reach out and touch life again – chew it, taste it and re-experience what it meant to be alive again. I can’t help but be honest here to say that I too, have done the deed. We are, after a point, by nature meant to be a little carefree. It’s in our DNA to rebel, even against common wisdom, sometimes even for the heck of it. It’s why I made plans, travelled, met people and socialised the hell out of the interval this virus presented us with. Like you, I was perhaps also, more ignorant than optimistic that this had, indeed, passed. But what did I know, right? What’s strange now, however, is that I don’t feel guilty anymore about any of those excursions.

After entering the third calendar year of living in fear — are we even capable of being as earnest as we are supposed to be? Anything that helps you stay afloat is good, no?

Didn’t I deserve a drag of oxygen after walking circles around my house — to stay away from my desk? Did you not need that mini-vacation to feel human again? Was it worth the risk? You and I both wonder. Sometimes I do feel the guilt for even thinking it, but it’s easy to brush it away because all I was trying to do was take my chances berating a form of evil by doing evil to it. It sounds odd, and perhaps stupid, but in a funny way, it’s the reason I believe we behave the way we do. It’s not much of an explanation, because disobedience is subjective, but it is at least how I’ve rationalised not wanting to adhere. Simply because I wanted to live a little after surviving a lot.

I get that the pandemic is a serious affair. However, after entering the third calendar year of living in fear — are we even capable of being as earnest as we are supposed to be? Anything that helps you stay afloat is good, no? A meet-up here, an outing there, hell even the introverts need to eventually hold onto something other than just the walls around them. 

It’s kind of a relief that everyone’s going through the same thing, but some of us are maybe going through it more than others.

Yes, it’s kind of a relief, you know, that everyone’s going through the same thing, but some of us are maybe going through it more than others. People who began their colleges with virtual lectures have become graduates with uncertain futures. People have lost jobs, hopped career paths come out the other side of this trainwreck looking like someone else too. And then there have been those, who have suffered, wept, loved and lost – lived a lifetime in this couple of years. How do you throw the rulebook at them?

It would, of course, be wrong to not acknowledge privilege in this conversation. The privilege to make choices, to survive. Not all professions come with an inbuilt option of work-from-home. Not all people have the resources to make digital payments. Even when you were ordering your stuff online, someone had to deliver it to you – risking everything. In a way, this pandemic never began for a proportion of this country that simply couldn’t stop doing what they were doing before it.

Today, wherever I look I see a tiredness, a defeated look of desperation on people’s faces that says they want their lives, whatever little they can afford of it, back.

Today, wherever I look I see a tiredness, a defeated look of desperation on people’s faces that says they want their lives, whatever little they can afford of it, back. It’s not even the life of exotic trips and fine dining maybe, it’s just the life of getting to see each other, participating in each other’s lives. It’s the life that maybe cannot be had without a degree of chaos built into our routines. Without that animal instinct to both protect and celebrate that which is momentary. Yes, there is a pandemic, a worse one than the last wave, but look around, and it kind of tells you people are struggling to care. Whether it’s right or wrong, I’m not sure, but it is what it is, and I guess we have to begrudgingly take it.